There is precious little enough privacy in the world today. I DON’T want to be tracked from site to site - where I go is MY business - not anyone elses. If I want to find something - I will. I don’t want to have merchandise pushed on me like I were at a used car lot and trying to fend off sleazy salesguys. Enough commercial pressure in the world as it is. I very deliberately avoid any targeted ads directed at me from places I go regularly …no sense encouraging the invasion, I figure.
BTW, most privacy policies are an absolute joke - I figure very few people must read them…

Does it make the Internet less “friendly” - absolutely. It’s a pain in the ass at times. Is it worth it to protect the privacy that I treasure? Absolutely. People that blithely leave Javascript turned on, click on every ad and link in sight - are pretty naive. FYI, I’m a software security architect - and I’ve seen enough to convince me that this (at least) the minimal measures I should take.

It’s not considered very good form to openly broadcast the IP address of site visitors/commenters which I don’t believe wordpress.com does. I have your IP address here for leaving comments but would only use it if our services in some way were being abused. That includes spammers, overzealous bots or outright denial of service attacks.

I personally have no interest in tracking down normal human readers unless they try to be destructive or harassing in some way to our server and service. Can’t speak for other webmasters, but that’s how we play things with our stuff. We also use third party stats tracking software (site meter and Google analytics) which track innocuous (IMO) things like browser type, OS, screen size, country of origin, referring URL, etc. It’s all explained in our privacy policy at the bottom of the page.

I’m not naive that privacy is a concern and I’m not shrugging it off, just explaining how things operate here and if you choose to visit any of our sites, then you are consenting to that — or must leave and visit sites which don’t tell you what information they are collecting and what they do with it, if anything.

Bottom line: there are technical ways you can better protect your identity and location, so do some searching and employ those if you’d like.

I’ve just recently started a blog on Wordpress.com. I had no idea that when I was leaving comments my IP address was right there, point blank, staring them in the face. I have an abusive ex that I don’t need him to find me.

I can blog on any other site and those bloggers, who are regular bloggers just like myself, do NOT have access to my IP address so freely like Wordpress has made damn sure to provide to it’s users. I do not want other people’s ip’s and I certainly don’t want them having mine.

Yet I have no choice in the matter.

This is completely wrong. This is a service that I, I repeat, I should have the option as to whether I want to make my IP address available to bloggers.

And while you might not have an issues about privacy and them showing up at your door… what about those people who live in small towns? For instance, children are told not to use the internet to provide personal information, such as where they live, and that they are to list the next big city to them so that child molestors don’t have the option to anticipate how easy it would be to go to the main street, sit there, and wait.

It’s very unnerving.

I’m not impressed by it. My ip address should only be available to Wordpress in this case. NOT to bloggers who use Wordpress. This is completely unacceptable and wrong.

I could go into a whole lot of details here. And I’m sure when I come back here to read your response I most likely will if you haven’t given me some kind of solution! And I would hope you start to see why it IS a concern rather than to be naive about privacy and shrug it off.

Thank you.

Actually, I’m a bit paranoid online simply because a lot of what I do for a living involves tracking people and what they do on our corporate web site (sorry, can’t name the company). I know what we can do online if we want to and therefore I don’t trust any third party, especially those in the business of tracking people. Please don’t get me wrong, I support personally customized web browsing. The problem is, a few bad players (like ClickPoint) have ruined it as far as I’m concerned, and the US Congress continues to support company’s desires over individual’s privacy concerns. So, for now (essentially as long as we have opt-out based privacy laws) I don’t let anyone collect any information on me except the absolute minimum. It’s not a dig against Google per se, it’s just they don’t have an opt-in based tracking so they are on the “bad” list for now.

By the way, I also own Google stock.