Big Brother is watching you

The ubiquitous reference to an authoritarian regime is perhaps overkill for this blog entry but I do feel kind of guilty.  It is apparent, from most people that I talk to, that in general users of the internet are not aware of the level of information that is routinely collected on them and stored for posterity.  Well, maybe we're all aware we just, in that typically human way, manage to ignore it somehow.  We can switch off that conscious part of the brain and hide from big topics like death, homework, tax returns and in my case the dishwasher.  My original intention for this blog was not an attempt to generate followers or readers but it does tickle me to think that others read it and I often look to see who has.  Recently I had my first Hawaiian IP address.  You can see on the map above there is a dot.  I can zoom into this and show the detail, this map shows the last 100 unique IP addresses that viewed my site.  If I paid money, there would be more detailed information available, so advertisers and others may well be getting significantly more info from each of us than this.  I have had a different - and less user friendly - counter running since the launch of my site.  Thanks to a tip from Simon. Currently, there have been 1066 unique hits and 1063 visitors to my site - excluding the IP addresses that I usually connect from.

The simple screen dump of info from the Sitemeter site looks like this:

This hawaiian visitor was on a peak day..... (UTC -11hrs = 08:08:22 am Mar 31st)

Lest you misunderstand my motives here, I should probably add that what I am attempting to do in "broadcast mode" is what I have been doing to certain individuals on a 1:1 basis.  Namely, inform them about the quantity, nature and automation of the data that is available on all of us.  So there you go.

You have a little peek at me and I'm peeking back through the curtains ;-)