From this article entitled “Start-Up Links 65 Million IP Addresses To Users, Readies Targeting Platform”:
… [T]he company ClearSight Interactive is getting ready to launch a form of targeting based on users’ IP addresses. ClearSight, which describes IP addresses as the bridge between users’ offline and online data, has spent the last 18 months acquiring more than 100 million IP addresses — along with email addresses and postal addresses — from publishers. As of today, ClearSight Interactive believes it has collected enough data from publishers to reliably link 65 million “sticky” IP addresses — typically for people who connect to the Web using cable modems — to specific individuals, ClearSight president Tim Daly told MediaPost today during a break at the OMMA Behavioral conference. …
People’s surfing can be tracked by exploiting a browser loophole basically which lets anybody see where else a site’s visitors have been on the Internet, see e.g. two “online target marketing services” Beencounter, and Haveyourfriendsbeenthere.
Hackers can figure out who we are. And of course Google has entered into some sort of agreement with the federal government. Soon simply a typing cadence may identify the person typing.
For those who kick it old school, at least one survey of subpoenas against anonymous Internet speakers is underway.
–Ann Bartow
