Here's a creepy surveillance experience / mystery I had with Comcast, our ISP.
I'm on the board of a co-op in downtown Ann Arbor. We signed a lease on a new location on March 11th. We made no announcement to the public.
Two days later I got an email from a Comcast rep:
"I work for Comcast Business out of our local office.
I believe i just read that you will be opening at 221 N Main in the near future.
I can help you move or set up services at this location"
We have no idea how Comcast could have known this! Could the landlord have entered the lease in some database that sells data to Comcast? Or the realtor entered the lease in a database? Could they be capturing that information from our Gmail or the realtor or landlord's email?
All the data was traveling over Comcast on our end.
It was an extremely creepy email to get. No matter what data they are buying, it is impressive that they correctly parsed the information and linked it to us.
As it happens we put in great effort to drop Comcast in favor of a local fiber provider.
But yechh. High speed internet should be a public service like drinking water.
@samfirke Did you put in a forwarding address with the post office? I've never moved an office, but moved houses a lot and change of address always started those emails off.
@samfirke I'm pretty confident it wasn't them listening to the internet traffic, almost everything is encrypted these days and Comcast has no way of knowing.
We went through a broker, right? I wouldn't be surprised if they get something (kickback or "free" service to manage deals) from data brokers in exchange for commercial real estate data.