Status_203 - 2:08 pm on Feb 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

Wow :0, just wow!

168 posts, and if a single post made reference to users' privacy then I missed it (my apologies if you were the sole one ;) ). That might have been par for the course in 2002 but today? You should all be ashamed of yourselves ;) .

I'll admit I've previously found aggregate referrer information to be useful to me. If it goes away though I'll have a hard time justifying any sense of outrage. And the AOL experiment made it quite clear that the only thing stopping individual drill down into information possessed is the morals of the person doing the possessing. Do you trust those behind every web site you visit?

Can anybody provide me with an explanation of why we should even be entitled to the domain (where) a visitor comes from, let alone query strings (what they were doing while they were there)?

Let's face it. We've been taking advantage for personal profit of the lack of safeguards built into a system invented by academia, in the same way spammers take advantage of same in email! (No, I don't seriously consider this as bad as spamming or I wouldn't have done it myself (but I still need a shower), but it does have a similar smell.)

[edited by: Status_203 at 2:08 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2009]