Privacy on the internet - a great mis-understanding!

So I'm reading this article this morning about the congressional concern of privacy on the internet. How interesting, the government is concerned (Link1). Are they concerned about individual privacy or are they concerned about missing out on the information?

It is well known that the ISP typically, with exceptions, allocates IP addresses dynamically but keeps a log of who gets which IP. However, the only people who can access that log is the government. It is not available to anyone else. If you doubt my statement, please, read Peter Fleischer's article (Link2). The only people who can (and that's questionalbe) link the IP to potentially an account are the ISP or government. The reason why it is still questionalbe that they can find the exact computer is because as we learned earlier if someone is using internet from home (say cable) and has more than one computer on their router, we will not be able to distinguish which computer is connecting to your site using the IP address.

All of the other people in business for behavioral targeting online, are not even close to identifying a user on the net. Yes, they can tell your geo-location and your language preference, and where you clicked around, but there is no way that they can identify what computer you're using! However, the non-tech savvy are easily scared due to lack of knowledge. And I will not be surprised if the government is jumping in so that they can regulate the online space and collect all the info that the self-regulatory online industry is unable to get. All they can get is statistics of clicks segmented by a certain similar clickstream or the so called "behavior" to make things sound a bit more sophisticated.

Well, hope the internet remains self-regulatory, so that everyone can still have their voice and be free to express themselves! And if you don't want your information out there, don't post your private stories on your blog or your site with all of your contact details - be smart about it! Believe me, a web marketer doesn't have time to search through your facebook page, your childhood enemy might!

Link1:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/technology/11privacy.html?ref=technology
Link2:
http://peterfleischer.blogspot.com/2008/02/can-website-identify-user-based-on-ip.html