Now, RL me is not worried about companies, government agencies or such getting hold of said visiting card. The matter is completely different when it is Rheta (SL me) doing the surfing. Having her linked to RL would rapidly entail an avalanche of trouble, a busted marriage probably only counting as the first diffuse rumblings. (@Vint I admire the way you link your SL persona to your RL identity, but not everybody is in a situation to easily do so). And while I do not mind services I have subscribed to being able to pinpoint me (like Linden Lab, who hold my RL identity anyway), I am somewhat (and hopefully understandably) wary of having my RL identity easily trackable through every single comment I happen to leave on a blog.

Which makes me use Tor, courtesy of same pet techie, which is indeed a disgracefully slow experience (oh, by the by, @Daman if you think slow and fuck only go together in the negative, I am sure I do not want to ever share my bed with you ;) ).

So, yes, I absolutely agree IP addresses allowing to identify people should be considered personal data, because same people might not want to be identified every time they surf the web :).

- Someone changed the wiki entry on SLart recently.
- Although I agreed with what was posted, I think the more neutral text was better.
- I checked the IP address of the person that changed the entry.
- I ran that against the IP address of the people comment here. (I was curious if it was one of my readers.)
- I found an almost match (same provider, same city).
- Dropped an e-mail to that person, asking if it was them who changed it.
- Got a reply ‘euhm… lolz… do you want me to change it back?’
- A few minutes later, the original entry was reinstated.

:D

Whas that invading my commenter’s privacy? Probably. But I felt justified, as I thought the SLart article should stay ‘neutral’. But then the question is, what justifies, and what does not, and where do you draw the line? (Neat use of IP for instance, is that here on the poll, you can see where the people that voted yes or no are from. Under that privacy law, that could not be possible anymore? On the other hand, nobody links the IP to a person, just to a ‘no’, ‘yes’ or indifferent question.)

The IP accounting idea is a bit strange, as it would have to be someone who has both bits of data. The ISP who assigns the IP address, and then they would have to obtain the IP logs from the sites.

So it woud be Police or a Govt agency

As far as I know, this didn’t happen with the child porn investigation ( known as Operation Ore in the UK ) or there would have been more arrests.

Confession time..I was once rather bored at an ISP i worked. One day I saved the proxy logs, and decided to have a look what people where looking at.. so I ran grep for the word sex…and the result was about a third the size of the log.

I could also see the proxy logs and the people on the system in real time and see what they looked at.

In Windows 2000 there is a hidden file called MM256.dat, this has something to do with IE, and it has a copy of what you have been visiting, and who is logged in to the PC. I’m not sure it’s in XP, I’ve not looked, or have I needed to use it for any reason.

/me blushes and crawls under the desk in shame. Did I say something? :D

Indeed Dandellion. Imho, as a citizen, you should not worry about giving out your addresses, cell phone numbers, etc… as companies and governmental services you give those to, should not be allowed to pass them on, share them or process them over and over.

About the question, I don’t care myself really.

Tor is damn easy to install, so if I really want to be anonymous for a quick surfing trip, I just log into that. Only problem is that’s it’s slow as fuck, but then again, it’s not like I need that kind of protection 24/7.

Except for that, my own blog probably logs IPs. Don’t think I can see those though. Maybe I can *shrugs* As if I care, the time that an IP-ban mattered died when dynamic IPs popped up.

I’ve seen requests to know who put up a website 5 years ago, and who linked to it. We got asked a few times to find out about a mailserver at 192.168.0.1 or in that IP range. (yes seriously)

Given what you can do if you spread ip-addresses between different services it’s good that it have some legal protection, phone numers are protected, ip-addresses are no different.