Run It Yourself

But what about privacy?

The division of address space between global registries can provide information about the location of an address as well as its originating device. There are many IPv6 address assignment methods available, including DHCPv6, SLAAC, and Manual assignment.

DHCPv6 or the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6 is a protocol for configuring IPv6 hosts with IP prefixes, IP addresses and other configuration settings needed to operate in an IPv6 network.

IPv6 hosts can also use stateless address auto-configuration (SLAA).

Such auto-configuration on the basis of the MAC address is a particular privacy concern for mobile devices such as laptops and phones.

The MAC address of the device always stays the same and so it’s basically the device’s ID. So, when you access the internet from a different location, the MAC address based identifier can be used to track the movement of a particular device. It also provides the type of hardware used and allows logging of user’s online activity.

This could have been done even before, but space was a major restriction. This lack of space forced the use of NAT and NAPT which provided a certain amount of privacy. While NAT cannot be considered a privacy solution by any mean, it does provide a layer of abstraction between network communications and the device to a degree.

This certainly increases user privacy since an outside viewer cannot distinguish what device made a particular request without deeper investigation beyond a NAT gateway. Now that IPv6 can provide more than 10000 trillion IP addresses for each human alive, we are looking at the future where each device on the planet has its own unique IP address.

That, together with the already huge problem of companies craving for our personal data so they can sell customer-specific ads becomes an undeniable concern. There was a report that an AI program assigned for tracking the buying habits of Target customers determined that one customer was pregnant and that person started seeing ads for baby products.

At first, it raised the eyebrows of many people, they even decided to contact the supermarket’s manager who kindly apologized, thinking that it was a bug. Only a month later the parents confirmed that their daughter actually was pregnant.

We don’t want such personal information leaked even though this case wasn’t as serious as many of them are. Implementation of IPv6 hasn’t solved any of our problems and judging by many critics, problems are getting worse with each day.

With IPv6 address space being so huge it reduces the need for address recycling. This allows agents to harness the certain characteristics of an IPv6 to mark a specific user and its fingerprint. This would allow tracking of an individual as soon as they get online, even further diminishing internet user privacy.