Art Of Money

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I was working on a privacy document for a new site and as I sketched out all the various policies that the document need to address, I started to wonder how many people don’t even realize how much information about themselves that they leave behind when they do something as simple as visit a website.

Let’s crack open a typical visitor’s log entry and see what I get when you visit my site.

I know:

• MSIE 6.0 - Your browser version
• Alberta, Edmonton, Canada - Your location
• b020650f1950c2f35.ed.shawcable.net - Your computer’s host name as assigned by your hosting company
• 68.149.160.170 - Your IP address
• www.google.com - The site you came from
• q=elite keyword - The search term you looked up on Google to find my site
• 26th June 2007 15:21:38 - The time you arrived
• 10 mins 28 secs - The length of time you stayed on my site
• page a, page c, page d - A list of all the pages you looked at on my site
• Windows XP - Your computer’s operating system
• 1280×1024 - Your screen or monitor resolution

This list is just a partial list, since I use a simple JavaScript logging service, there is more information available with real server logs.

If they start to get into setting cookies onto your computer, a webmaster, or ad company can then begin to track your browsing activities across many sites. Why would they want to do this? So they can “understand” what you are interested in and fine tune the ads you are exposed to in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Notable on this list is your host name as it is a unique name that can be traced, via your hosting company to your account. If you do something illegal online, like download stolen mp3’s, the record company can subpoena your provider to get your name and charge you.

There isn’t really anything too dramatic on this list, but it still feels a little bit alarming to be leaking all this information every time I visit a web site. Services like MyBlogLog also up the ante by tracking sites that you visit while you are logged into their service.

The other thing to note about this info is that it is not only available to websites that you visit but also to the computer providing your Internet access. If you are at work for example, the techies (or the boss) would have this access stored on their system by default.

You can understand the explosion of privacy cloaking applications and proxies which hide this data.