Comment by gck1
5 days ago
I use multiple Google accounts to segregate the data that gets collected on each one - as I don't like having, say, TV logged in to the same account where I send my emails from. One of them, which I use exclusively for Gemini, was banned today (I violated no policies, Google just doesn't like the way I try to sanitize its access I guess).
Now, I can simply restart my router (or cycle airplane mode on mobile) and get a new IPv4 that probably was used by bazillion people before me, or even along with me, and get a new account. So Google has to be very careful here, with IP-linked bans in order to not just ban the whole load of unconnected people just because they used the same IPv4 as me.
With IPv6, they could just ban my entire family and any guests that might have connected to my WiFi, forever.
I like the limitations of IPv4, thank you.
Doesn’t IPv6 have random, anonymous addresses (RFC 4941)? Further, user fingerprinting flourishes without IP addresses.
> Doesn’t IPv6 have random, anonymous addresses
Only for the device identifier part of the address. Prefix that the ISP will allocate will remain static, unless ISP does rotate the prefix too, which they don't really have a need to, unless for privacy reasons. And knowing ISPs and demand for privacy, it's highly unlikely to happen.
> Further, user fingerprinting flourishes without IP addresses.
It does, but is still hard to do. Static IP prefix is going to make the heuristics much, much better.
Besides, evading most of the fingerprinting techniques is not that complicated - most of it is in the hands of the client. IPv6 adds something out of the hands of the client.
Many ISPs do rotate the prefixes that they assign to customers. There’s plenty of people on here complaining about it as a reason not to use IPv6.
The problem is google
Yes, it is. But it's not just Google. User fingerprinting is already a massive market and is growingly user hostile. There's at least one HN post each month of someone losing access to their account for no real reason and no way to get it back.
I don't want internet infrastructure to support this behavior. On contrary, I want it to resist it, and IPv4 does, to some extent, while IPv6 makes it much easier.