Stephen Downes

I like Anil Dash but I think he's serving up a bit of revisionist history here. There were informal standards, he writes, to the effect that websites would never track or surveil their viewers. It's not true, of course. Of sure, maybe in some circles such an agreement existed. But even the very first web servers tracked every access. My most successful project ever (reaching hundreds of thousands of hits a day) was the Referrer Project, from 2002, exploiting the use of the HTTP_REFERER environment variable to display where visitors to a website came from. From the very early days, search engines used redirection to count hits to referenced web pages. Even today, there's no real expectation that we aren't being tracked and surveilled online. None of this mattered until the web became widely used and commercialized. That's when it began to be used against us. That's when it began to be a problem.