Tas vs. Goofball: Privacy Concerns & Online Tracking

Tas at Loaded Mouth attempts to clear up some misunderstandings concerning, online privacy and hit-trackers. I've reformated these excerpts into a script format for the sake of readibility. Now, observe as Tas crushes goofball using solar-lunar stance.

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Goofball: I do have a problem turning over my [IP] address or being followed around the web after I visit a site.

Tas:  If this is what you're afraid of, then you should be going on the web. At the most basic level, the TCP/IP protocol which all Internet users use to access content from websites and email is merely an exchange of IP addresses. You can't go anywhere on the Internet without revealing your IP address to somebody.

Additionally, no matter what website you hit and whether or not they use a counter, logs are kept on the server level. Being a webmaster as well as blogger, I can tell you that those logs kept on the server are far more detailed then anything sitemeter gives to me.

Goofball: Ethically, my former professor wondered why an individual wants visitors but feels that it's okay to gather information on them?

Tas: Sitemeter doesn't do that. The purpose of sitemeter is to track the amount of people who have hit your blog, see who referred them, and see what page they exited from. Sitemeter doesn't even show me the full IP address. Of course, as I stated above, I get the full IP address through my own logs, but that's unavoidable. Webservers keep logs, and I'm the webmaster here. But, again, I feel it's important to stress that all webservers keep logs, and this constant exists whether or not they use sitemeter.

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This concludes this educational presentation.