On Thursday 19 January 2006 22:59, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > I've read about half of the above. It may just be that I'm a bit naive > about the matter, or that the bods writing in the blog are totally > paranoid about their identities, but to be quite honest I'd really like to > know what the real harm that can be done to the clients and their machines > is? > > As far as I have been able to tell so far, it looks like a pretty harmless > way of getting usage info about one's site. Certainly a great deal nicer > than some of the tricks I have heard about or using cookies in the less > desirable ways. > > OK. So the WWW Site operator can now find out who, and in these days of > fixed IP numbers - exactly who - has accessed his WWW pages accurately. > Whoop-de-do. I suppose the paranoid will say that it's yet another thorn > ready to prick the balloon of privacy in which we like to think we can > hide. I've got news for you: You cannot hide on the 'Net. > > Given that somebody who is operating a WWW site finds that some record of > the visitors is a very nice thing to know, I'd say that overall this > mechanism has more benefits than horrors. > > I mean - getting real for a moment - it's not going to suddenly enable GWB > et al to make terrorist attacks on us is it?
The problem I see is that it's not only the WWW site operator who can find out exactly what/where you visit. Say you are on siteA and have a link to siteB but the ping goes to $STATS_COLLECTING_AGENCY e.g. Doubleclick, Adsense, etc. Then if more than one site you visit are pinging to $STATS_COLLECTING_AGENCY that stats company will be able to build up a pretty good profile of your WWW usage. I'm haven't read anywhere about whether the ping sends cookies or not but if so, then $STATS_COLLECTING_AGENCY has an even easier job. Sure privacy is a joke on the WWW, but we may as well hold onto every little shred of privacy we can get. All IMHO hads -- Leela: Hey, you know what might be a hoot? Professor: No. Why would I know that?
