The TV industry has pretty rich data about you as well. If you have cable and use a cable box, there's a considerable chance that not only are your viewing habi

The TV industry has pretty rich data about you as well. If you have cable and use a cable box, there's a considerable chance that not only are your viewing habits being data mined, advertisers are able to dynamically target specific commercials at you. The term is "addressable TV" if you want to look into it more. And your cable provider has likely pulled your credit report as part of signing up (to avoid requiring a deposit), as well as confirmed your identity, physical address, and phone ynumber. All very valuable information and making it much easier to stitch your data into third party data sources if they want. And if they're also your internet provider, theoretically have some potentially lucrative access to your overall interests, usage patterns, devices in your household, etc. All of which could be leveraged at just the metadata level to derive secondary information such as your daily routines, household size, major life events, whether you have an affinity for Apple vs Android, whether you're an "early adopter" of tech, etc. Cable providers can be just as if not more capable of creating and monetizing incredibly rich data about viewers as their non-cable counterparts. If they're in the mood to risk any PR fallout from it.