One of my tasks as an undergraduate in the engineering firm I was working at was to look after the website. Back then knowing a little HTML and how to use FTP wasn’t as common as it is now.

The web hosting company we used provided quite detailed logs for all of our virtual visitors. By looking at the IP addresses in the logs it was possible to speculate (the key word here being speculate) which company the visitor worked at.

Our sales and marketing guy caught wind of these logs and suggested we send emails to the companies we suspected had had one of their employees visit our site asking if we could be of any assistance or if they required any further information.

I explained that a) we didn’t 100% know that they had visited and b) this raised all sorts of privacy issues. Plus to me this sort of practice was creepy and not how the Internet was supposed to work.

How naive was I?