[at-l] Falling Tree at Pine Grove Furnace

[jbullar1 at twcny.rr.com (Jim Bullard)]

At 09:55 PM 6/7/2004 -0400, DTimm65344@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 6/7/2004 5:09:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
>mtnstream73@eufaula.rr.com writes:
>
> > <It's only a zip code and birth date. >
> >
> > Its not even a birthdate.  Its a birth year!!
>
>It didn't ask me for anything, just loaded the story.  Must be because I 
>use AOL. <vvvbg>

Or... you had previously visited that site on another story and there is 
now a cookie on your computer. The data they are asking for is merely 
demographic not personal. Unless you live in a tiny community where no 
other person of your gender was born the same year as you, they can't 
identify you from those three bits of data.

So why do they ask? They need to sell advertising so y'all can read this 
stuff "for free". When they go to businesses to solicit advertising the 
business wants to know who their audience is. They don't want to advertise 
to groups who will never buy their products/services. It's a waste of money.

You'd be amazed at what (non-personal) data is gathered when you visit a 
web site without you even knowing. I can get daily stats from my website 
that include the following: Hourly Summary: Domain Report: Organisation 
Report: Host Report: Host Failure Report: Failed Referrer Report: Referrer 
Report: Referring Site Report: Search Query Report: Search Word Report: 
Browser Report: Browser Summary: Operating System Report: Status Code 
Report: File Size Report: File Type Report: Directory Report: Failure 
Report: Request Report. I can tell what files were viewed, for how much 
time, what operating system and browser was used, whether the file was 
found by search word or referral, and where the requests came from (server 
and country).

This is just the overall summary for yesterday.
Successful requests: 194
Average successful requests per day: 227
Successful requests for pages: 130
Average successful requests for pages per day: 152
Failed requests: 16
Distinct files requested: 88
Distinct hosts served: 36
Data transferred: 1.312 megabytes
Average data transferred per day: 1.547 megabytes
Moral: If you think that you are leaving no tracks when you surf the net, 
guess again.