[Jack Simth]

It's hard to say if they are collecting the information or not - they have a Privacy Policy posted, and it mentions the sig image briefly:

Signature Graphic: Some Users on Internet web sites link to our signature graphic. When a person views the signature graphic, they see their own IP address and other information only. It is not possible for your information to be viewed by others, as your IP address and other information are dynamically added to the graphic which is shown to you and to you alone when your web browser loads the signature graphic for our web server. The purpose of the graphic is to raise awareness about what types of information every Internet collects about you.

... but it doesn't say squat about whether or not they save the info.

But if you think about it for a bit, they are pointing out that any time you load anything Online, you broadcast that info - they just make you aware that they recieve it. Of course, what is really fun, is that it is the servers that normally deal with the info - usually just to send a page back to the requester, sure - but there's no particular reason the server itself couldn't trap the info and store it somewhere - and you would never know. If you are too terribly paranoid about it, don't go Online; or, if you'd like, you could try one of the anonomous browsing services, such as @nonymouse.com - which makes the graphic return a different IP and removes the OS, ISP, and browser info - of course, then you are filtering it all through a single site, and you can't be sure they aren't collecting the information.

Of course, tracking people's IP addresses doesn't really help an advertiser, as most Internet Service Providers use DHCP, which causes the IP address of a client to change periodically, so that the IP address can't be readily used to track a potential customer without the ISP's cooperation.

Edit: Also, I might point out that these Boards store your IP address....

[ April 04, 2004, 07:08: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]