In June 1993, New Yorker magazine ran a now famous cartoon, summarizing this perception. It showed a dog sitting at a computer, talking to another canine. It's a myth, and a dangerous one, because people can do wreckless and unwise things when they believe they are truly anonymous. Being just one of millions of people yammering away in Usenet newsgroups, it's easy to think the Net is really structured as chaotically as it looks. Long before cookies came along, it has always been possible to monitor every page a person visits in a web site.
Webmasters have access to lots of data.
Your computer is a Windows 95. Your Internet browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer. You just visited the Arc-Hive Conspiracy site. By fingering that, they see my name is K.K. Campbell. I go, everything I click on.