Surfer Privacy or The World Bank Finally Articulates its Mission

Should bloggers disclose the people coming to their sites?  I've gotten used to all the information Sitemeter gives me for each person visiting the site.  I've posted about it and on occasion posted a copy of an individual page.  No, it doesn't tell your name or your email address, but it does tell your ISP address, your location, type of computer, browser, how you got to the page (if you linked from somewhere else) and what search terms you used on Google.  It doesn't tell me all this for everyone.  Some people have found ways to block a lot of the information.  Proxy browsers do that for you and probably there are other ways to sanitize your tracks.  But I know that when I show people all this information I get, they are surprised.

So, should a blogger share that information with the world?

• I think it's important to remind readers of this once in a while so that they realize the tracks they are leaving at websites they visit.

• I left my Sitemeter data available to all visitors on the grounds that transparency was a good thing, people should poke around and see how many (few) hits I get and where they come from.  When I did that, I didn't think about people trying to track others down, and I think it would be a pretty tedious job.  Plus coming to this blog - given the variety of topics covered - probably doesn't reveal much.

So, it's all there.  But should I put individual pages up for people to see?  I think I've done that a couple of times.  If I recall, I did that with the 123,456th visitor to the blog post, just to show that he was really the winner of the 123,456th person to the blog contest.  And I did it more recently when I discovered that someone from a State computer had spent a couple of hours on the site one day.  But I smudged out the name of the agency and the ISP number.

So, what's all this a prologue to?  Well, I do think it is good to remind you that you are leaving tracks.  Here's a link to a Google search for "Surfing Privacy".  You can get some ideas on how to leave less of you littered around the internet.  Of course, telling people about this means that they might try scrubbing some of the data off their tracks which means I can't tell when agencies and companies visit when I post something about them, or when they are searching for something.

Which leads to why I got started on this post.  I got a hit from someone using a World Bank internet connection.  I had to smile when I saw the term they were searching.  It really is what their mission is, even if it isn't how they state it in their annual reports.  This person searched for "unfuck the world, the song."  Maybe now the World Bank has a clearer focus.  Ideally, they'll put it up as background music on their website.