Tracking

I had this Sitemeter freebie on my blog, kinda so I could tell if anyone who shouldn't be reading my blog (like scary googlers and school administrators) wasn't and sorta so I could tell if anyone was reading my blog. I forgot about it until recently, so I decided to see if I have had any odd visitors.

Here is what I learned. Anyone can click on the free sitemeter and see exactly what I see. You'd think that is not a big deal, but I can see latitude and longitude information for each visitor. And I can plug that information into Google maps and see desperate visitors sitting on their toilets cruising the internet on their iphones. Ok, not really, but have you seen the street view deal on Google maps? Did you know you could just paste in someone's coordinates and suddenly you could get directions from your house to the general vicinity of wherever they are surfing?

Yikes. I could see where this would be helpful if you are being stalked or harassed, but dang it sure seems like it would make it easier for the weirdos to find you. It's not exact, but still.

So I removed my sitemeter. You're privacy is restored here. But watch the other places you go. Make sure other bloggers don't have an open tracker.