Computer Help and Support

At your house, it depends upon how you get your IP address, and who it comes from. Most people have a "dynamic IP" address that is allocated semi-randomly to their computer when it connects to your ISP (whether or not it is by cable modem or another method). This dynamic IP address often changes, but the ISP usually have logs of what IP is handed out to what computer. So if the ISP keeps the logs, with some work, the IP that you use could be traced to your computer. Btw your computer has a unique id -- its MAC address -- which is paired with the IP address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address).

There is a public service "IP Geolocation" where anyone can take an IP address and try and look up the location from it. It is usually laughably inaccurate. It's good for getting the country (and US State) of the IP, but not the city. When I tested with my IP addresses it identifies me as coming from a city about 50 miles away ... because that's where my ISP connects to the rest of the Internet. Often it will just return the center of a region and not anything more accurate. Sometimes it'll give up and return "0,0" and give you the mid-point of the contental US. Which (if I remember correctly) happened to be in a large lake. Basically GeoLoc can be useful to figure out a default language for your web site if you're concerned about multiple language support. But not useful to send the police to pick up someone.

But .. .when you're using a cell phone, the cellular provider is your ISP and the IP address is handed out to your phone when you connect to their network. I don't know for sure, but I would expect they keep logs of when each cell tower gives out which IP address. And probably also the IMEI (unique id) of your phone that gets the IP.

So yeah, the exact location of your home internet use might not be easy to get, but if you login with your cell phone ... the logs could pair your web usage with your specific phone, and then it's just one more database lookup to translate your unique phone id to your real id.

This is why the hackers developed the 'dark web' to make it difficult to track people down. And one reason why VPN's are a business, to obscure your IP address from the other end of your network connection.

Hope this helped