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

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 08:56:33PM +1100, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> Looking at the technical possibilities.
>
> They could be analysing aggregated weblogs for individual websites and
> perhaps even profiling the anonymous visitors.

they're analysing proxy logs at various ISPs and only receive aggregated
(i.e. anonymous) summaries.

> In the majority of cases the "identifying" IP address would be a
> dynamic IP addresses allocated by an ISP.

yes.

> I am a little curious about
> a)who their ISP Partners ar

any ISP who runs a proxy server and wants to run their scripts.

> 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)

they make it up, like any web stats program does.

> Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics!

and next in the sequence, there's Web Stats.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

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