Can a Website Owner Tell Who Visits It?

Does a person who has a website have a way of knowing who visits it?

~Flo

Dear Flo,

It depends on what you mean by “who”.

If you mean, can they tell who you are by your name, personally, no, not unless you have accepted a cookie from the website, with which they have associated personal information about you.

However, even absent that cookie, they can tell a lot about you, including your ISP, the time you visited, the IP address from which you visited, from which website you were referred if you came from another site, and even to some extent the location from which you visited.

Anne