On the subject of monitoring behavioural patterns
I recently run into an excellent Firefox extension called Ghostery. This allows you to view in your browser things (“web scripts”) that monitor your behaviour and which then upload the collected data to some third party for further examination. For instance, Google Analytics is such a popular service used by many websites.
I am not implying that such services are necessarily “evil”. In fact, they do help the website owner understand the audience better and provide a smoother online experience. Some websites do this in-house by using custom tools etc. whilst others allow specialised companies to collate and provide meaningful data. So it can be all good, but it seems to me that having this information in the hands of a handful of entities, say a few widely used statistics gathering companies, is not a good thing. Using IP-tracking or cookies such companies can easily monitor your web crawling habbits to some extend.
Anyway, it is good to be informed of such things and then have the option of disabling the monitoring facilities. If you think that this is just paranoid, let me remind you that in the age of information these things take very little time and effort to implement. And, yes the big companies have privacy protection mechanisms (or in some cases a privacy protection “pledge”) in place to ease such concerns.
But it never hurts to be careful and now you, gentle reader, have something to think about.