Comment on IPv6 & Opnsense & Not Exposing Machine-Specific IPv6s to Corpos
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week agoI know, but when you get captcha’d all of the time you feel like you’re kinda winning (but not really of course). I don’t want them to just have a nice fingerprint of my devices without having to try at all. I see others have mentioned “IPv6 privacy extensions” that let the devices cycle the multitude of IPv6 address space to keep a semblance of privacy - that seems to be the “default” solution
Mordikan@kbin.earth 1 week ago
I think the idea of an IP address (IPv6 or not) providing anyone a semblance of privacy is wishful thinking in this age. Google ad revenue in the EU is estimated to be lower because the power in GPDR areas isn't in PII obfuscation, its in the consent model. Positive opt-in to Legitimate Vendor Interest makes tracking difficult, not whether your IP is generic. You have to remember companies like Google are still able to monetize off of users in mobile CG-NAT environments in the US/EU. Given the roughly 150 other metrics Google (or any publisher/SSP would have access to), removing one doesn't really stem the tide.
What's also interesting is how IPs become anonymized. For IPv4, the industry standard I kid you not is to take the 4th octet and mark it zero. That's it. It just assumes carriers use /24 CIDRs like someone's home network might. The funny part is what if that was 50.50.0.0/22? A publisher could in practice replace one user's IP with another user's IP which means that they still would be passing PII unanonymized which could violate GDPR.
IPv6 uses the same basic system.
2001:db8:85a3:8d3:1319:8a2e:370:7348becomes2001:db8:85a3::. You just truncate at the 64th bit. Rolling through available host bits doesn't really matter then. IPv6/IPv4 really aren't ever used for Google user syncing.glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I do appreciate you taking the time to write that up! Is the 50.50.0.0/22 crossing US and EU IPv4 allocations? From searching it looks like it’s around the boundary between US and Germany allocations. Interesting, I had no idea IP anonymization existed or was applied in such a haphazard way