Companies do indeed give away free comps and dial up access to use in marketing schemes - no surprise there.
There's some Perl scripts that can track wherever you link after you hit a site unbeknowning to the user.
I worked for an ISP with a guy who did computers for the army for several years and his comment on the possiblity of logging every keystoke: "don't laugh, you'd be surprised what big brother can do."
I was getting some irritating pings from a server I had no dial up access to, yet every time I transmit or recieve data their mutherfucking IP address kept popping up, so I sent my firewall log file to their administrator demanding to know exactly what the fuck was going on; it stopped soon after that.
For the eccentrically paranoid: get a cd burner, back up your system, reformat your HD every month and reinstall your software (hey you need something to do when you're 8up)
Rule of thumb for cookies: if you do any type of online purchasing with a credit card, delete cookies.txt before proceeding with any transactions. Don't go surfing to sites that use cookies before you order, go straight to it, do your business, then delete your cookies.txt file again, close browser, and you're good to go.
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Brock
"My reality check bounced."