Those pesky logfiles
There’s no secret here. When you visit a website (any website) you leave traces behind. In technospeak, you are entered into a log file, which allows the interested (usually just diligent system administrators) to tell “from whence came the anonymous visitor”. Gives an address and timestamp. Given the millions and millions of entries generated, 24/7, this amounts to digital noise.
Unless the interested include government employees, wanting to check on… well, anyone who had a particular interest in the content of a given website. Say, those who are not always aligned politically, with the government. No, it doesn’t just happen, and it doesn’t just happen in countries that are run by despots.
Stateside (isn’t anything newsworthy now happening south of here?) the government has subpoenaed the logs from a site that was frequented by those who protested against the current president. The ISP has, in turn, protested the thinly veiled inquisition. This is hardly proper behavior for the officials of “the land of the free”. Unclear how this will play out (the story says that negotiations have been underway for several months now), but it doesn’t bode well for democratic process.
Meanwhile, I have my own logfiles. Which go into the bit bucket, regularly. No real interest in tracking my visitors (for the main, spiders and robots from other websites). I’m not going to change my content to appease the anonymous. You can comment if you feel the need (and I get precious few of those). As I mentioned, logfiles are part of the overhead of a website. Not the reason for having one.
