end-user ipv6 deployment and concerns about privacy

Thu Aug 19 12:49:30 UTC 2010

On Aug 19, 2010, at 5:30 AM, Joakim Aronius wrote:

> * Hannes Frederic Sowa (hannes at mailcolloid.de) wrote:
>> 
>> But most people just don't care. My proposal is to have some kind of
>> sane defaults for them e.g. changing their prefix every week or in the
>> case of a reconnect. This would mitigate some of the many privacy
>> concerns in the internet a little bit. Of course all the already known
>> problems would still exist. And still people have to care about the
>> technology to reach a higher level of anonymity.
> 
> Ok. Lets assume that the ISP hands out new prefixes to the clients CPE each week. The CPE then advertises these prefixes on the clients home network. For clients accessing the internet this works fine (except perhaps a glitch during the switchover). 
> 
> But what about the internal communication in the customer premises? How do they connect to their NAS, media players, printers, TVs etc? Of course there is UPnP, DLNA and different other kinds of magic but I imagine that most home users actually configure IP addresses at some point. 
> 
You actually imagine wrong in most cases. Many do, but, not most.

Most use mDNS for such things these days, actually.

> Constantly changing prefixes will ad another layer of complexity, things will break, and customers will be upset. (and quite frankly I don't think that you would gain that much privacy anyway) 
> 
I would agree. I think that customers that WANT privacy at the expense of having their prefix
change often being able to request such service might be a good value-add service you could
offer, but, I think the vast majority of customers would prefer prefix stability.

I think that the privacy implications of a stable prefix are vastly over-stated in this thread.

Owen