A true-life question - am I anonymous?

Before I apply for a job, I like to visit the company's web site.

I would like to think that no one in the company has any way to tell if I had visited the site unless I told them.

Can web sites collect e-mail or other information from their visitors without the visitors knowing it?

The only think they could know without you telling them is your IP - which gives them *NO* way of tracing you without a court order. So you're safe to go to any site without them knowing. And to be quite honest, if you were thinking of working for me, I'd expect you to find out all you could, so you were better informed at the interview. So I would probably ask you if you'd seen the company site anyway.

Kevin Stone schrieb:

This is not entirely true, but unless their traffic is extremely low, that's fair to assume. For many ISPs you can connect IP ranges with general geographic areas.

See http://centralops.net/co/BrowserMirror.vbs.asp to check what information your browser really transmits.

Please also note that your posting history on Usenet will be available if you've used your real name.

Cheers

The stuff at http://richgrise.tripod.com/cgi-bin/hello.pl shows what's available to the web server.

Cheers!

'Michael Mendelsohn' wrote

It's also available if you haven't used your real name.

Vince schrieb:

It is not available to someone who doesn't know your pseudonym, though, because there is no useful way to retrieve and read it.

Cheers

Rich Grise schrieb:

[quoted headers of my newspost snipped]

So which computer am I using?

If you do know what computer I am using at a particular time (maybe because I am reading my email using Internet explorer to display HTML, and it pulls embedded images from the web, and you've sent me a specially prepared message), you can probably correlate that with postings made at that time from the same IP. If I don't have that privacy leak in my mailer (and don't do online chat with you etc.), I can't see how that helps you. You could access my provider's logs, but that requires a criminal prosecution.

I am surprised that you can use the domain example.net in your message ID without controlling it. Are you certain your MSGIDs are unique?

Cheers

Well, there's an IP number. Which won't answer pings, BTW, and dig returns NXDOMAIN, so maybe it's not all that specific.

True.

I don't know what this means. 'Control' what? Example.net is given as the one URL that's guaranteed not to step on anybody. I guess even 'nothing.com' and 'nowhere.com' are real domain names.

I have no idea, but I presume that somehow the USENET system takes care of all that.

Thanks!

My headers certainly won't tell you 'which computer' I'm using. They tell you which ISP's dial up pool I've posted through, and they tell you which newsreader I'm using.

From the latter you can make a guess as to the operating system I'm running. The obvious guess would be wrong.