I’ve just had a phone call from someone. “Oh, you’ll be surprised to get this call, I expect”.
yes – I was. Because I had looked at his web site yesterday, and he extracted our IP from his logs (presumably), and discovering that I was a web developer, rang me up to see why I was looking at them, and what I thought of them.
now, I know that web logs catch this information – and indeed, we capture it ourselves, and analyse it. But I would never *ever* dream of phoning someone who had appeared in my web logs – I think that’s a real invasion of privacy.
am I alone?
NO. That’s move invasive than a spam email and I wouldn’t like it one bit. I wouldn’t ever dream of doing that, either.
That’s really quite nasty actually. Analysing web logs is an important part of developing a website but I’d never pick out the visitors one by one and then hunt them down. What did you tell him?
I was so taken aback, I didn’t tell him anything – I said I looked at hundreds of sites every day, and that his didn’t ring any bells. And then when I checked it, while he was on the phone, I remembered why, and told him.
what I *should* have told him was that he was invading my privacy, and to fuck right off.
Can’t get many hits if he has time to ring all the visitors!
that’s what said 🙂
You are not alone.
I’d use logs for getting some feel for the amount of traffic, finding out about unexpected referrers or unusual agent strings, pinning down the causes of 404s so I can fix them … all sorts of things like that.
But I’d feel deeply uneasy if I thought someone was studying my entry in their log on an individual basis.
I was called once by the editor of a free online journal relevant to my work, who was basically panhandling for donations to keep his site going. I told him that up until then I might have considered paypal’ing him a few Euros, but by cold-calling me like that he’d lost any right to any money from me, ever.
three little words
public proxy server
Re: three little words
no – I don’t particularly need to hide my browsing habits, nor should I need to.
this chap crossed a boundary in digging out a phone number and using it – that’s my point.
Re: three little words
Well it’s obviosuly information you freely give away. So what are you going to do to stop it happening again?
email, maybe, if I was looking for a web developer and one jsut happened to cross my log. but a phone call? very intrusive.
Ye Gods!
Wow. That is scary.
Luckily I think my phone number is being black listed by most cold callers because I *will* keep them on the phone for five minutes explaining that I haven’t got a phone.