Failing Enterprise Anonymous Surfing

Some visitors to Failing Enterprise have expressed concern about what sort of information gets recorded by our servers and what they can do to enhance their anonymity.

Please review our Privacy Policy.  Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

1.  Our Servers Log Only IP Addresses, Which Are Of Limited Value:

For every page requested, user registration, and discussion board post, our servers record the IP (Internet Protocol) address (as well as a timestamp and the URL of the page you've requested), but nothing more.  This is very common and is the default for most web servers and discussion boards.

If you're curious, you can find your IP address easily by going to a web site like WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.  It will be displayed right there on the first page.

Some companies provide geographic database services that attempt to match a location to an IP address.  To see one of these, visit GeoBytes and they will give you their best estimate of where you're located.  Anyone who has your IP address could do a similar lookup.

However, having an IP address is of limited value, though, for several reasons:

A.  Often many computers share a single IP address (through what's called Network Address Translation, or NAT).  For example, if you're coming from an organization of a medium or larger size, your traffic is probably going through one or a small number of proxy servers or NAT boxes and taking on a shared public IP address in the process.  If this is the case, your specific internal IP address would not be revealed.

B.  Often a single IP address is part of a pool that gets dynamically assigned when you connect to your ISP (through what's known as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP).  It might be your IP address now, but it could be someone else's in an hour.

C.  The site gets visited by over 18,000 unique IP addresses per month.  For all intents and purposes, you're lost in the crowd.  I also generally don't even look at the logs.  Now that we're serving 30,000+ pages per day, they're huge.

D.  Your IP address generally belongs to your ISP, or your ISP's ISP anyway. Tracing it back might lead only as far as your telephone company or your cable TV company.  Tracing it further would probably require a court order.

In short, your IP address often really isn't that revealing of anything about you.

2.  I've Never Revealed Any Information To Anyone:

Regardless of what's recorded, I've never revealed any information about visitors to anyone, not even IP addresses, and I have no plans to.  Of course, I can't refuse a valid court order, but given recent developments in Internet law, it would be fairly hard for Enterprise to obtain one, and I would probably fight it very hard and very publicly, and the publicity would probably dissuade Enterprise from pursuing this line of action.  The story would probably end up on www.SlashDot.org and Enterprise and the employees who made the decision to pursue this folly would receive extensive, public, vicious criticism.

More on Enterprise car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page.