As we are a education network we collect & monitor both inbound and outbound traffic (as directed by
Becta ). The traffic I was refering too was the inbound HTTP traffic onto & through our network. We can also glean form this info what web clients are being used etc. All this is quite standard as even pprune collectsn this kind of browser clients stats (i.e. what browser your using and at what Reslotion etc).
If you want to know more, go to the link I provided, or do a seach of the net on the subject.
At the end of the day all well run large web sites & networks (as the one I work for and also pprune) collect this type of data so as to be able plan capacity for the future. Saying that, this very different to what Gator and the like do, which is trick you into downloading a small peice of software that actively monitors were you go and what you do on the web, and then 'pushes' 'targeted' ads at you.