What do I know about YOU?
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What do I know about YOU?

My friends are always paranoid when I say I can see how people find my site: The first question they ask is "Can you tell who I am?" and next "Can you see what my email address is?"

The answers are "Well, sometimes I can guess" and "No, not unless you put it on the webboard or something".

To set everyone's mind at rest, below is a typical extract from my activity logs. What can I see here?

  • I can see the visitors IP address 
    (eg 213.121.212.121).     
    From this I MIGHT be able to guess who is visiting - I can resolve the IP address through http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois or http://www.arin.net/ and it will tell me who that ip address belongs to.  It is only rarely that it will be registered to an individual, however.  Mostly it is registered to an ISP such as freeserve, AOL or BT, or a company.  If it is registered to a small company and I have a friend who I know works for that company, I can hazard a guess it is them.
     
  • I can see the referring URL.
    (eg "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=thirzah")
    From this I can tell how people found my site.  In this instance they looked up "thirzah" on google.
     
  • I can also see whatever information the browser decides to tell me
    (eg "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)").
    In this instance I can see that the person was using Internet Explorer 5.01 on an NT 5.0 machine. Sometimes I will see a bit of advertising here such as the ISP name, and there are some viruses that put gobbleygook in the tag for fun.
     
  • After the opening entry, I can see what pages the visitor viewed on my site, so I can see if they were interested in my car, family history, or in this case, my shoes and cake recipes!

I cannot see:

  • what other web pages this person was looking at
  • what their email address was
  • where they went to next

Furthermore

  • If you type in the URL eg "www.thirzah.co.uk" into your address bar, then I will not see what page you had on the screen before then.  I only get referral information if you actually click on a link from another page, eg from a search engine results page.

Here is the sample log extract:

213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:33 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 14203 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=thirzah" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:34 +0100] "GET /images/stripey.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1323 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:36 +0100] "GET /images/welcometo001.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 557 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:36 +0100] "GET /images/trans.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 43 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:36 +0100] "GET /images/nonrienderien.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 3156 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:36 +0100] "GET /images/warchildlogo.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 675 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:37 +0100] "GET /images/tn_rugstare.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 6284 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:37 +0100] "GET /images/linzeecherry.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1491 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:42 +0100] "GET /DAILY.HTM HTTP/1.1" 200 7409 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:42 +0100] "GET /images/whiteblue2.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 7558 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:43 +0100] "GET /images/star-dates.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1235 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:44 +0100] "GET /images/star-chars.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1638 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:44 +0100] "GET /images/star-daily.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1483 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:46 +0100] "GET /images/star-elements.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1223 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:46 +0100] "GET /images/potatoes.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 2761 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:48 +0100] "GET /images/cabbage.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 7477 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:50 +0100] "GET /images/banners/kingcheetah.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 9052 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:50 +0100] "GET /images/banners/reknew.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 24711 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:08:52 +0100] "GET /images/banners/reknew.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 24711 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/DAILY.HTM" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:27 +0100] "GET /favourite_shoes.html HTTP/1.1" 200 1648 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:27 +0100] "GET /images/converse_sandles04.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 43322 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/favourite_shoes.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:27 +0100] "GET /images/converse_sandles03.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 25263 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/favourite_shoes.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:42 +0100] "GET /fantastically_chocolately_cake02.asp HTTP/1.1" 200 11687 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:42 +0100] "GET /images/fantas1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 11361 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/fantastically_chocolately_cake02.asp" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:45 +0100] "GET /images/fantas4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 25847 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/fantastically_chocolately_cake02.asp" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:11:46 +0100] "GET /images/fantas3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 9221 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/fantastically_chocolately_cake02.asp" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
213.121.212.121 - - [16/May/2002:14:13:24 +0100] "GET /software_links.asp HTTP/1.1" 200 2154 "http://www.thirzah.co.uk/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"