[tempguy9999]

There's a big difference between your ISP knowing stuff and the river of scum that is advertising.

> But I wish I didn't have to.

One way or other you will always have to. Perhaps the most important way of destroying the ad industry online is to have an alternative means of funding sites. Maybe that would work.

[wlesieutre]

Of course my ISP knows my identity, but my point is it's also probably not hard for an advertising company to get one piece of data that links my real identity to my cable modem's IP address, and then any tracking data they've previously accumulated can potentially be tied to that after the fact. They just need to tell when IP was assigned to me, which is probably easy to infer from a sudden change in what websites an IP is visiting.

On a related note, remember that time when AT&T and Verizon were just giving out the cell numbers associated with their customers' IP addresses to whoever asked, because they're complete fucking morons who thought that was a good idea?

https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open...