It's not what you know... (Part 2)

...but perhaps what you don't know, or maybe even what you don't know that others know about you...

I recently joined Google Analytics. Analytics is a very interesting and useful tool - if you control the code for a website then you can use Analytics to monitor how many people visit your site. In my case, I can use it to see how many people visit my blog in any given time period.

This is Analytics at its most basic. It gets much, much deeper, and I am still only scratching at the surface. It can show me whether each visitor is new or returning (using their IP address I guess). It can show me, on a map, where my visitors come from in the world, not just countries but cities too. This data can be displayed on tables that also show the amount of time spent on any given page (or the site) and the number of pages viewed per visit. I can see how many people are referred through another site (i.e. by clicking on a link on someone else's blog), or direct (they typed in the URL) or through a search engine. I can even see what search term they entered to find my blog. Analytics can tell me what internet browsers people are using, and what sort of connection they are using (cable, dial up, DSL etc). By the time you have read this it is too late, the data is in Analytics. The only thing you can do is close the browser to change your "average time on site".

Of course, I cannot see individual's IP addresses, or identify visitors in any way other than by processes of deduction (someone visits the blog directly from Wellington, I figure it is someone I know and not someone who has just stumbled across me. But this program has raised some questions in my mind over the last few days. It is very basic, simple, user friendly and, possibly above all, free to use. All you need is an account with Google. This prompts me to ask, if I can access something so basic to monitor all this information (and it has the potential to show me a lot more) then what sort of information is accessible/gathered by, for instance, my ISP, or my email provider, or companies that advertise on sites I visit? There is so much personal and potentially sensitive data out there, and for the most part none of us actually have a clue who can access this information. I think this goes beyond the standard concern about viruses, trojans, malware and etcetera that we install software to protect ourselves from. We voluntarily enter so much about ourselves on websites for banking, networking, emailing, or whatever, that we can not possibly know where it all goes and who has access to it.

I guess what I am really just asking myself (and others) to think about is: what do we actually know about the technology that we use, or more to the point, what don't we know.