With this information, anyone can get your address, often with a map and driving directions to your house. Surfing the net opens the door to all sorts of information gathering. Web sites normally gather information from visitors both passively and actively. Anytime that you accept a cookie or fill out a form, you are giving away information. Unless you have taken certain precautions , I can tell what page you are looking at, see how your found the page, see what your IP address is, see where you are from, and even see what browser you are using.
Internet usage comes at a price.
If you use Usenet, chat, instant messenger, or message boards, even more information might be available based on what you say and do. This is subtle but useful information for profilers and other researchers. While you can use Internet investigations to dig up dirt on your friends and neighbors, it is more useful and productive in competitive business intelligence and in helping to find bad guys. There are a number of things that you can do to determine what an employee or family member has been doing on their computer. You can see what web sites they have been visiting and what they are looking at.