Interesting (aka Big Brother is Watching You)

Its amazing what you could find out about people on the internet

For example in your cookies will be lots of ones like “USERID” and the rest which will identify you to the site. This can be useful, remembering settings and the like. BUt it can also be used to keep track on what people like.

Is this good or bad? Well, it doesnt exactly give you privicy. though your browser is telling this site lots of data about you anyway. Just incase you didnt know, everytime your browser requests a page from this site, in doing so it tells me what sort of system you are operating, and which was your previous page. This is the data that I can then display on my visitors page. (Much the same as other sites do too)

There are some interesting off shoots from this. for example this could allow me to decide which bits of my site to work on, and if i was to implement tracking of individual users (well, actually its only individual browsers for as long as the cookie lasts) I could see the way in which users browsed around my site. This would be interesting from a Human Computor Interface point of view.

Some may take exception to all this. well, that can be solved by just turning off cookies (though this will mean many sites do not work) and also stopping your browser from passing all the normal infomration about itself to the server everytime. How you do this depends on the browser.

But do you think i can do anything malicious with this data?

Once you have some of this data, it is possible to do some interesting things. Sites like SamSpade.org allow you to see where IP addresses are registered. All this really does is tell me which ISPs are the most commonly used by people who visit my site.

I cannot track a person by their IP. In most cases they are dynamically assigned to individuals anyway, so i can tell some one is at Imperial College browsing the web, or they have their Internet connection from BT but i cannot tell more beyond that. It is possible to track people down further, by matching up with IPs on (for example) discussion boards.

So bigbrother can watch us. Even if we dont believe that someone is looking through the Logs of our ISP, and the sites we have visited. BUT if desperate we can stop this. If we so wanted. Myself i cannot really be bothered. Afterall, here is a website all about me. If you wanted to track me down then you could, though I guess in many cases its the other way round, you are reading this because you already know me. Inwhich case, what’s the point?

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