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There isn't any anonymity. Google "partners" with many ISPs (Comcast, for example), co-locates equipment, and they can link your current DHCP address to your c
by Froedlich 5y ago
There isn't any anonymity. Google "partners" with many ISPs (Comcast, for example), co-locates equipment, and they can link your current DHCP address to your customer name. It doesn't matter whether you even have an account with a Google service.
Before they had ISP account data, they knew the DHCP pool sizes and watched DNS lookups to identify users with a sufficient accuracy for most purposes. Most people visit a specific handful of sites, often at specific times or in a specific order.
For users coming in countries with better privacy laws, or through ISPs too small to be "partnered", Google buys tracking cookie information from various sources. There are hundreds (thousands?) of companies in that business. Cookie tracking isn't as good for finding your specific identity, but it's very specific about where you go and what you look at, which is primo information for marketing purposes.