IP addresses and personal information (was Re: [LINK] Fwd: On Line Opinion - 16 February 2007)

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Irene Graham wrote:
<snip>
> It seems to me obvious that they could not know how many individuals visit 
> particular sites without access to and use of IP addresses.(and Hitwise do 
> not suggest otherwise). They may consider that their "partner ISPs" are 
> doing that, not them. If so, then it is quite possible in my opinion that 
> any ISPs using IP addresses from web proxy logs for that purpose (without 
> customer consent to that use of that information from which the ISP can 
> identify them) are more probably than not in breach of both the Privacy Act 
> and the Telecommunications Act. 
<snip>
Looking at the technical possibilities.

They could be analysing aggregated weblogs for individual websites and 
perhaps even profiling the anonymous visitors.

In the majority of cases the "identifying" IP address would be a dynamic 
IP addresses  allocated by an ISP.
To tie these to an individual the ISPs would need to provide some kind 
of data matching.

I am a little curious about
a)who their ISP Partners ar
b)how they derive gender and lifestyle attributes (but maybe this is on 
the basis of the sites visited as a class and that it doesn't matter 
whether the person is really a girl)

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics!

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
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