Site Statistics; Invasion of privacy?

It is good to know the number of visitors to our blogs, isn’t it? It might even be good to know from where the visitors are visiting. But do we need to know what operating system they have, what IP address they have, what kind of browsers they use, what time zone they are in and what was their local time when they visited our blog? Or, do we really need to track their domain, and their organization from which they made the visit?

All the information collected here, can provide a very good statistics on many computer–related commodities and as a result they can be valuable information for the manufacturers of these commodities. Basically, in most optimistic way of looking at this issue, by each visit to other sites we are potentially participating in invalounteered surveys, whether this information is used or not is not the issue. The issue is that the information can potentially be used.

Beside, the accuracy of the information on all the specifications of the visitor’s PC system, makes me wonder if a lot more information cannot be extracted about the content stored in that PC. Thes information can range from simple routins (what time ususally we do what), to all our interests (Where do we usually visit and what are our favourites), and even what files we have in our system.

As I said, this is a very optimistic situation. How if you want to look at this a bit deeper. Given the fact that in many cases, the high tech technology available to us as consumers is not the highest technology that exists and there are some institutions and organizations which are always one step ahead of us in some particular technologies, I think it would be reasonable to think that a lot more quantity and a lot more accurate information about our lives can be extracted from each simple visit we make here and there.

I am not a computer expert, but I think if you have already visited a site/blog and if you have left a comment before, it might not be very difficult to figure out that the new comment is yours even if you use a different name. Also, it is not difficult to figure out where you are (all this is of course if you use the same computer each time you visit).

The question is whether we would like to give out so many information about ourselves. And whether this is not some kind of invasion of our privacy. I might be wrong. What do you think?