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Entry tags:
full disclosure
A discussion in another journal has caused me to realize that what seems an innocuous action to me might be objectionable to others. So, disclosure and an invitation to discuss, if you care to:
I sometimes use a sort of "web bug" in my posts so I can collect limited access data (which data LJ does not provide). I did this initially out of simple curiosity, but soon realized that I could use it to find out (without asking) which of my posts get read more (or less). While I write primarily for myself, it's worth knowing if there are certain classes of posts that my readers tend to ignore. Secondarily, this also gives me some idea of where my "secondary" (non-LJ-subscriber) readers might be coming from, which is casually interesting.
To me this seems akin to someone who hosts his own blog reviewing the server logs. To others, I'm learning, this is akin to "spying". While lj-toys does try to report which LJ users are reading what, it's far from reliable. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not really looking at that; I've got much better things to do than to peruse logs so I can say "aha! so-and-so claims to be my friend but never reads me!".
At the bottom of this post is a one-pixel image file. (If I could use something more blatant, I would.) If you're using Firefox and the AdBlock extension, you can block that image and lj-toys will never see hits from you. If you're using some other browser, I'm afraid I don't know how you can disable it.
If you feel that what I'm doing is objectionable, I would like to understand where you're coming from (here or privately, as you like).
I sometimes use a sort of "web bug" in my posts so I can collect limited access data (which data LJ does not provide). I did this initially out of simple curiosity, but soon realized that I could use it to find out (without asking) which of my posts get read more (or less). While I write primarily for myself, it's worth knowing if there are certain classes of posts that my readers tend to ignore. Secondarily, this also gives me some idea of where my "secondary" (non-LJ-subscriber) readers might be coming from, which is casually interesting.
To me this seems akin to someone who hosts his own blog reviewing the server logs. To others, I'm learning, this is akin to "spying". While lj-toys does try to report which LJ users are reading what, it's far from reliable. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not really looking at that; I've got much better things to do than to peruse logs so I can say "aha! so-and-so claims to be my friend but never reads me!".
At the bottom of this post is a one-pixel image file. (If I could use something more blatant, I would.) If you're using Firefox and the AdBlock extension, you can block that image and lj-toys will never see hits from you. If you're using some other browser, I'm afraid I don't know how you can disable it.
If you feel that what I'm doing is objectionable, I would like to understand where you're coming from (here or privately, as you like).
Re: the internet is scary
I haven't checked how that gizmo wors, but if I wanted to create something like that from scratch, I'd have a URL that looks like it's for a static image file, that my web server would actually treat as a CGI-ish script to create the image on the fly (using ImageMagick for example) based mostly on information in the HTTP GET request that your browser sends in order to load any web page, image, or other web-object from any web server. The OS and browser will (IIRC) be in there unless you've instructed your browser to lie (see whether there's an "identify as some other browser" setting in the preferences section, change that, and reload this page to see whether that makes the sign change). Unless you use an anonymizer like The Onion Router, or are behind a NAT router, your IP address has to be on the IP packet that contained the HTTP GET request. And the script can make a pretty good guess who your ISP is by looking at the last few machines listed by a 'traceroute' back to your IP address (there may be an even more reliable way to do this, by looking up whom the address block containing your address is assigned to -- I've never researched that).
So the first sign is all stuff that a) has to be present for the Internet to wor, b) is expected to be present the way the Web works (but you can falsify), or c) is trivially extracted from (a) -- if you have access to a Unix/Linux shell (if you're on a Mac then you do), or have Cygwin installed on a Windows machine, type "traceroute 208.74.33.11" for an example of how that could work.
The second sign, the geolocation one, uses a technique invented (I think) by the porn industry and since adopted by ... damn near everyone trying to use the Internet for advertising or direct sales, AFAICT. I don't know the details of how it works, but the basic algorithm should be Googleable. More importantly, I do know that it's ubiquitous, just not usually waved in your face like that. If you're on a site with a nationwide or worldwide audience, and you keep seeing ads for business near you or targeted to your area or for your local television stations, the site (or the advertisers paying the site to display their ads) are using this technique. If you hit the web site of a multinational corporation headquartered overseas and what shows up is the division that serves your country / your language, that could just be luck but often it's this IP geolocation trick again.
So yeah, this information (and more) being accessible to web servers is ordinary; the only thing spooky is having it waved in your face in a way that makes it look like some sort of magic trick. (The psychology of that is rather powerful, as you've noticed. It even effects some of us who know how it works, for a second or two.)
Re: the internet is scary
FYI, here is a technological criticism of geolocation.