When you access a website, does that site have any way of identifying your IP number? If so, it could have linked your personal information from some other site where you voluntarily provided it. Is it possible that your computer ID and contact info is on some marketer's list or government agency, and that this information is being sold to other marketers, or for more sinister purposes?

When we post to this board, our number is logged and printed under our post, so I assume this is pretty trivial to do from a technical point of view. Cross-referencing that number to your name is something else again. It has the potential of reconstructing not just who we connect to, but to establish a record of everyone we connect to. And what about something like a search engine, where they can connect you to a record of every topic you have ever made query on?

At the very least, they are able to determine you are providing bogus contact info, perhaps by scanning a list of valid known names.