They have a huge data center to power this monitoring. They can identify individuals by your IP and also your patterns. What you type, language used, and sites visited are unique enough to identify individuals.
A ‘digital fingerprint’, so to speak.
IP is almost arbitrary unless the ISP is giving up info. The IPv4 address space is pretty much depleted leaving almost all of us on NAT’d address spaces. Reboot your cable modem periodically and you will most likely land on a different address. A simple wget wrapper script querying the root servers for arbitrary “A” records and affixing “www” in front of said record and you can easily randomize your “footprint” by fetching the default site. Kick a random # generator into a while loop and it just looks like you are surfing away. Hard to pin a pattern to that.
I know this will come up, so, DON’T use public proxies either. Those things being “free” are nothing but data miners and the overseas versions are deep packet inspected (i.e., just waiting to fetch some user info to exploit).
Bottom line, security through obscurity is at play. It’ll cost you some bandwidth, but certainly not processing horsepower.
“They have a huge data center to power this monitoring.”
Until the Norks or the Iranians set off an EMP, then they’ll have bupkis;)
The DNA of the computer age! How progressive!
Anyone buy any dinosaur stamps lately in this microwave age? Hurry up, I can't wait forever for an answer - I'm late for my Constitutional law class.
Oh wait, it was cancelled. Hmmm.