Visitor Privacy (en francais)

In my travels through the blogosphere today, I came across Kinsella's post about the Minister of Revenue's political staff visiting the Oracle of Ottawa's blog. As blog culture evolves in Canada, and some blogs strive for recognition, I believe this will become a larger issue.

In the past, I posted the same sort of thing about Industry Canada, when they were visiting certain posts about Technoscam. After having done that a couple of times, I stopped to think about a couple of things. First and foremost, would I want my travels through the net posted and blogged about? Secondly, if I wanted to encourage people to visit, knowing their IP, time visited and other details might be posted is not exactly the best way of accomplishing that goal.

Since I made that decision, I have not posted, nor will I ever post the details of anyone visiting the site. Regardless of who they are, or where they came from, I believe everyone is entitled to their privacy. It's not my job to determine whether or not their visit is being done on corporate, government or anyone elses time.

Accordingly, I will be making a change to my blog template to display this decision. Eventually I'll probably fire up Photoshop and try and hack out some sort of button or graphic to reflect my policy.

I am curious though, as to what others thoughts are on this issue.

Cross-posted to Progressive Bloggers

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