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Internet Privacy: Do You Know Who's Collecting Information About You?

By Kenneth L. Stein
June 15, 2006

While savvy users of the Internet may be aware of the multitude of ways that personal information can be monitored and collected on the Web, most users are likely oblivious to the information trail they leave behind. How many readers of this publication, a population plainly concerned with privacy issues, have read the privacy policies of their favorite Web sites? If you have not, you may be surprised to learn about the amount of information collected by even the most popular and mainstream sites. For example, when a user requests and views a Web page from Yahoo!, that request is logged on Yahoo!'s servers with information including the IP address of the computer that requested the page. Even if information is not purposely collected, just about everything a person does on the Web is stored somewhere for at least some period of time.

Web surfers may take some comfort in the fact that the information they leave behind often does not itself contain their names or other personal identifying information. What the information often does contain, however, is their IP addresses. An IP address is a unique address assigned to every computer on the Internet. An Internet Service Provider can easily determine the name of a customer from an IP address used during a particular time period. As a result, finding the identity of users on the Web is often just a subpoena away.

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