can facebook give out ip addresses?

Question

Unfortunately I work with some really immature kids who thought it would be ok to spread lies and slander about me, and compromise my job. One of them claims someone created a fake facebook account and emailed his girlfriend to say he was flirting with a colleague. They have since split up and he is obviously set on revenge. Let me just start by saying I actually have a life, and was not even aware of this situation until a few hours ago. Life at work has been a living hell the past few weeks and now I'm aware of why, I will be going into work tomorrow and filing a complaint, but first I want to know if he is lying about contacting facebook and asking if the IP address of the fake account matched anyone on his friends' list - in this case, me - or if they are legally allowed to do that? My computer-savvy friend says as I use facebook on my phone the IP address will be the same as anyone else using that network signal, whilst others say facebook are not allowed to give out people's IP addresses like that. Does anyone know what could be the cause of this because I'm certainly not pathetic enough to get involved in petty drama that could cost me the job I worked so hard for. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

NO, and IP addresses are useless for your question.

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Facebook has a record of information [including an email address] about the person that created the "fake" account, and anybody that posted a comment. (People tell about themselves and forget!)

- The information can be released by court-order.

- - The information will not be deleted, even if the "fake" facebook account is closed.

Answer 2

In the case of serious cyber-bullying a website may, depending on their individual terms and conditions, give out the IP address of a user. It isn't common for them to do this and strong evidence of the cyber bullying has to be provided, so this usually only happens when the police are already involved. As CH mentioned, all you can do with an IP address is use an IP geolocator site to get a rough reference (within about 15 miles) of where the computer was used at the time. However, many internet providers send the signal through their main offices before then sending it to individual computers. So for example, in south east england Virgin Broadband often shows as in Oxford, because that's where their signal goes through. Also if they've used the facebook account from a mobile device, then the IP means nothing and is almost pointless to geolocate as they could've been miles away from their home at the time.

Answer 3

Facebook will not give anyone someones IP address.

Besides IP addresses are not very useful, all it does is show the location of somewhere(I don't know what it's called).

Like I live in Leeds and my IP will sometimes tell me I'm in Manchester or Huddersfield.