Comment by kstrauser
5 days ago
It’s ok to understand something and disagree with it. It’s another to proudly wear ignorance on one’s sleeve. That’s never a good look.
There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4. An ISP issues your house an IPv4 address and an IPv6 /48 network. Both of those can be subpoenaed equally. The privacy extensions work as advertised.
And in reality land, the big companies are the ones pushing for the upgrade because they’re the ones hardest hit by IPv4’s inherent limitations and increasing costs. Same rando in Tampa isn’t leading the charge because it doesn’t affect them much either way.
> There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4
With IPv4 behind CGNAT you share an address with hundreds of other users. This won't protect you against a targeted subpoena, but tracking companies typically don't have this kind of power, so they have to resort to other fingerprinting options.
On the other hand, an IPv6 address is effectively a unique, and somewhat persistent, tracking ID, 48/56/64-bit long (ISP dependent), concatenated with some random garbage. And of course every advertiser, every tracking company and their dog know which part is random garbage; you are not going to fool anyone by rotating it with privacy extensions.
CGNAT is nowhere near the common case yet. And frankly, I’m horrified that anyone’s describing it as a good thing. CGNAT is the devil, even if it accidentally has one not-terrible feature, and especially when ISPs realize that they can sell those NAT logs to companies who still want to track end users.
For tracking purposes, an IPv6 address is 48 bits long. That’s what identifies a customer premise router, exactly like a IPv4 /32 identifies one. The remaining 80 random bits might as well be treated like longer source port numbers: they identify one particular connection but aren’t persistent and can’t map back to a particular device behind that router afterward.
>CGNAT is nowhere near the common case yet. And frankly, I’m horrified that anyone’s describing it as a good thing.
For some reason, "CGNAT == privacy" is a very common sentiment on Hacker News. Yeah, Hacker News. It's bewildering, and after my last comment [0] talking about it, I have kinda already given up trying to convince people that CGNAT is devilish and not at all a privacy protector.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40180058
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When I was on CGNAT, sure I shared an IP address with hundreds of others, but the specific ports I was assigned on that IP were deterministic, and you can be sure the advertising companies were taking advantage of that.
Google aren't subpoenaed
Perhaps this is the difference, some people are concerned with being anonymous from companies like google, amazon, etc. Some don't mind that, as long as they are anonymous from a government.
Your mention of subpoena suggests you don't care about google tracking you.
Google gets subpoenad all the fucking time. They have whole departments set up to handle the case load.
Some public evidence: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/google-lays-off-c...
Sorry I meant to say google aren't subpoenaing
The people I want to protect my privacy from are google, facebook, amazon, they can't subpoena my IP, they can track me just fine though.
I was directly replying to someone saying they could subpoena the temporal owner of an IPv6 address, as though that were somehow different than IPv4.
The tracking is a moot point. You can be tracked using the same technologies whether you connect though v4 or v6, and neither stack has the advantage there.
IPv6 eliminates the possibility of proxies / VPNs. Being tracked simply by IP becomes non-optional.
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