Comment by orangeboats
2 years ago
It's something I had said before in another thread, but oh well... Here goes again:
The so called privacy-presevation of CGNAT is a double edged sword. Other websites can't track you, simultaneously that also means other internet users can't reach you.
The most obvious consequence is that to host a server, you must purchase a VPS or rent an public IP address from your ISP, and the price for a public IPv4 address is getting higher and higher.
The less obvious consequence is that you're giving up control to the VPS providers (and other centralized services). Does your VPS provider allow you to host Tor services? Run BitTorrrent?
It's rather ironic that people on HN, a website whose name literally includes the term "hacker", would support things like CGNAT which hurt hackers/hobbyists/"privacyists" the most.
To each their own. Want to be reachable? Use IPv6. My privacy is more important to me than being directly reachable.
If you think privacy can be achieved using CGNAT and not services like Tor or VPNs... then good luck.
I will be blunt: Long term, IPv4 and any technology that extends the lifetime of IPv4 will actually result in the death of online privacy.
I do a lot to preserve my privacy.
The CGNAT makes it impossible for random websites to correlate my actions among them - which is something they try to do while profiling me. It is, as you point out, useless against state actors and similarly funded-and-legally-equipped bodies; For those, you indeed need Tor and VPN and likely that's not enough even then.
But I care about the civilian "spies" following me; like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and friends. I use as little of their services as possible, with add blockers, a restrictive JS policy, ultra restrictive cookie policy, etc. It's unlikely any of them can correlate me with the other (or with myself from yesterday, for many uses). Giving me an externally imposed unique identifier (and a /64 prefix is just that, regardless of randomizing the remaining bits) makes it trivial for them and impossible for me -- unless I do all my browsing through Tor or something like that.
For the record, I have no proper FB or G account, but cannot avoid Whatsapp and an occasional Google product.
> I will be blunt: Long term, IPv4 and any technology that extends the lifetime of IPv4 will actually result in the death of online privacy.
Can you explain why you believe that? To me it sounds like baseless scaremongering.
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