Re: end-user ipv6 deployment and concerns about privacy

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

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

> * Hannes Frederic Sowa (hannes () 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