stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

No, if what you described were true it would be impossible to give someone an apple computer without getting confused for the person you gave it to.

Or to refurbish and use a mac from the trash can without being mistaken for the previous user.

I have done both with no problems.

Apple does know what you bought from them… because they sold it to you and gave you a receipt and kept a record of it to accurately account for taxes just like wal mart does when I buy a bag of apples from the produce department.

Wal mart doesn’t serialize their apples, but they do serialize their game consoles and keep track of those, so maybe that’s a better example.

I guess I gotta ask: what do you think is happening between the credit card and the serial number of the computer and how do you think it’s happening?

Again, it truly depends on who you want to avoid sticking out to.

If you don’t know that or don’t feel comfortable articulating it then I can’t help you.

I can’t just give a detailed explanation about what you might decide with regard to even some of the broad categories of entities that might hold, access, search or compile data about you and leave it up to you to figure out which person concerned about which entity in which circumstances you are because there’s a lot of circumstances around that and it would be unreasonable to write all that out and it would still be too general to be useful.

It depends on your goal.

If you want to prevent cops from using information about you in data brokers’ dbs, yes it’s worth your time.

If you want to keep from getting scammed or duped or have accounts open in your name then yes.

If you just feel worried then probably not, just freeze your credit with the reporting agencies and schedule a temporary unfreeze when you want to apply for something.

No matter what you decide, rotate the passwords to each account you’re worried about to a new unique one.

I have and use both.

Without choosing some sort of dns based ip blacklist (offered by both providers btw), neither one really does what you asked about.

What are you actually trying to prevent? If you don’t know what language to use, just describe the situation.

Yeah it’s unimportant how many requests go out.

A secure browser ought to phone home on startup (and honestly with as little overhead as requests incur nowadays, on tab open) and make sure it’s updated to the latest version, do a dns sanity check, etc.

I don’t even mind Firefox having ads in the default homepage.