Seeking Serendipity

I am in the process of working Gravatar into my WildObs site. Gravatar provides “hosted user icons” (avatars) for comments on blog/forums/social networks. I applaud that (1) ‘cos I don’t want to host/manage/backup (2) I wanted to save myself writing the  image crop (3) folks can use what they’ve already created.
They have good integration support, [...]

Standalone logging of an IP address might be minimally invasive (and restricting standalone recording/use would be problematic for many ‘Net systems/services) but online marketing companies don’t stop there. Far from it. Additional data (correlating an IP address to a person) is not needed from “subpoenaed ISPs”. This data leaks out continually and/or can be triangulated. [...]