EU Official: IP Is Personal

Eric Brunner-Williams brunner at nic-naa.net
Thu Jan 24 04:30:53 UTC 2008


Lou Katz wrote:
> They are both right. If you have a dynamic IP such as most college 
> students
> have, it is here-today-gone-tomorrow.
>
> If you have static IP (business, us slugs in the Swamp, etc) you are identifyable.
>   

Hi Lou,

Long time.

The thing is this isn't an atemporal question. The association of an 
address and any other information that tends
to identify an individual (say my googling the complete works of the 
co-author of "Survey of Modern Algebra",
along with Saunders MacLaine, in particular reference [1], the 
"original" treatise on shaped charges, and my
groveling for clue in DNS ops, and my ...) tends to unique closure over 
finite time.

So, for a single datagram sourced from a just-allocated at random DHCP 
pool, wicked hard to make PII.
But for many hours or days of stream to a variety of data collectors, 
some of which share raw or correlated data,
the problem is not insoluable.

Eric

[1] Garret Birkhoff, et al. "Explosives With Lined Cavities". Journal of 
Applied Physics. June 1948, p. 563-582.



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