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ISPs have your credit card number and home address. They can link your online and offline lives.

Google and Facebook have detailed social graph and search query, but your ISP could piece together a lot of that information by tracking your DNS queries, unencrypted HTTP traffic, email if you use their mail servers, and offline information.




Anyone who's ever bought an Android app has also given Google their credit card number and home address.

Also, Facebook and Google can both determine your home address by where your phone (and it's location tracking) idles for several hours a day.

Google buys access to credit card providers so they can link the ads displayed to you with purchases you make, to report how effective the ads are to the advertisers.


Why would ISP have credit card number? I pay my ISP with old good wire transfer.


> wire transfer

Which will include everything interesting about your identity. It literally is equivalent to using a debit or credit card


My ISP already knows my name. Nothing else gets sent along. My bank account number is not useful unless they get my history from my bank. Which is not likely to happen.

There's no 3rd party payment processor involved that could collect a bunch of my activity and then sell it to someone. With wire transfers, they'd have to go to everybody who I'm paying and ask for the data. Which is much less likely.




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