When you register a cell phone, one of the things these companies ask is for your tracking information like your social security number if you register through the phone or websites track your I.P. address. Sites can also know where you live based on your I.P. address.
When you send a message out through the internet, it gets stamped with a number from your hard drive and I don't know if there are unique numbers from your computer but you are being tracked.
Also, if you've ever sent out an email that someone didn't want, you should check a blacklist because your I.P. address is now blacklisted against certain sites so they can cut down on spam:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-checkI called my ISP and they said if I want a new I.P. address, I had to turn the modem off when I go to bed and leave it off for a couple of hours to get unblacklisted.
When you register your computer, Microsoft makes you either connect through the internet or a phone line to a phone number to register your information. They want to know where you live to access the computer and or internet or you can't use your computer.
I also went to a certain computer store and I used my credit card so when I logged into a specific message board, I saw certain things advertised to me that only would have been advertised to me through that store so they are sharing information about you and me. Scary? Also when I visit a site on the web, I see advertisements from that visit on other sites because unless you clear your cookies, that site is reading your cookies about which websites you have visited. Welcome to big brother.
Also, not to complain but you could further ask Mike what function the Yahoo bot and Bing bot I see here does with the website. It might index the site for different search engines so that people can find 6502 on the web. Maybe he knows more than we know but we don't ask so we won't know but it is probably in the user agreements when he started this site so he would have to read the fine print and put it together because they might not tell us what they are doing but you would have to piece it together with the fine print.