A LiveJournal-based tool for tracking anonymous guests by IP address

[azurelunatic]

(repost on account of original poster's deletion, cleaned up some and with points from comments added in)

Title
A LiveJournal-based tool for tracking anonymous guests by IP address

Short, concise description of the idea
A LiveJournal-based way to track otherwise-anonymous visitors by IP address.

Full description of the ideaSome LiveJournal

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

No. If you find out that an anonymous person with the IP XX has looked at your profile page, what does that knowledge benefit you? It's not forbidden to look at people's profile pages, so what are you going to do about it? Phrases like "even when the visitors have no ill intent, or have done nothing wrong. " are quite telling - AFAIK, it is not possible to "do something wrong" by merely looking at a journal.

And if I don't use My Guests because I'm not that interested in obsessing about who looks at my journal and because I don't want other people to obsess about the fact that I looked at their profile page because I found an icon of theirs in a comment interesting and wanted to see what it was from, I certainly don't want another LJ feature to reveal what I looked at.

I get that this is probably intended as a "security feature" for people who have problems with stalkers. The problem is that getting the information from this feature does not in any way increase your security. You can't prevent others from viewing public content in your account; AFAIK, you can neither report them to Abuse nor to legal authorities. If you are unsure about your security, you should have as little information public as you can, regardless of which IP viewed your journal.

[charliemc]

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well stated.

[gerg]

While Abuse (generally speaking, of course; every situation is different) will generally not do anything in these situations (since the worst thing we can do is make the content go away; in this case, real authorities can't really do anything once the content is removed from the service), that certainly doesn't stop people from filing reports!

Otherwise, this is definitely very well stated.

[lied_ohne_worte]

Oh yes, shouldn't have said that people "can't report it", but rather that the people it's reported to can't do anything - of course, people tend to report anything they can think of. Wasn't there someone who called the police because they didn't like their hamburger?

[azurelunatic]

And a fellow who called 911 from the back of a police car, upset that he'd been arrested.

[lady_angelina]

I think the one that takes the cake that I've read about was where a drunk guy trying to burglarize someone's house called 911 because "these people are trying to stop me!" XDDDDD That's more of a dumb crook story, but still.

[lady_angelina]

I concur.

And besides, there are instances when misclicks or other such errors might bring someone to a particular profile page without meaning to. It doesn't mean that the visitor has any malicious intent, no more than someone calling the wrong phone number. =P Yet some people get really paranoid over this sort of phenomenon for some reason.

Frankly, I don't give a fig for who views my profile or tries to view any of my journals (my personal journal is mostly Friends-only, and the other journals don't have any content in them that I don't want anyone to see). I've never enabled MyGuests and am really not interested in knowing who views any of my journals. I just don't understand what this big deal is that some people make it out to be. O__o

[trixieleitz]

Yeah, they might not even look at the content of the page - they might close the tab before it finishes loading, or open it in the background and never bring it to the front before closing their browser.

Anything I don't want publicly visible - isn't. Either by lock+trust, or by never being posted in the first place.

[lady_angelina]

Haha, yeah, at least that's easy to do, and hopefully, no one would be the wiser. XD And certainly less consequence than, erm... the time I accidentally friended the wrong journal because of a slightly different spelling. XD;;; Once I realized my mistake, I had to send them a PM before defriending to let them know that it was accidental so that they wouldn't freak out as much as they might have. Never heard from them, but still... it was mortifying. ^^;;;;

And if this suggestion were implemented, imagine how much more similar types of innocent errors could cause unease among users who are leery of anyone viewing their profiles and/or journals. ^^;;;

Excellent policy, that. The best way to ensure no one will ever see it is to never post it, period.