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I have a probably-foolish question about IPv6 and privacy, I suspect something fundamental I don't understand.

My home ISP issues IPv6 ranges that effectively never change. I know there is a spec for how to do automatic rotation, but mine haven't changed in the 9+ months I've been watching them. I think this is pretty common.

A big win if you want to run any kind of server as you basically get all the static IPs that you could want, at no extra charge. Yay!

However, isn't any privacy preserving stuff you do in your home web browser almost a waste of time now? At best, all the internet access from this location is trivially correlated by the IPv6 prefix. At worst, it's trivially correlated per-device if your home router never rotates addresses.

I know dynamic IPv4 isn't "for" privacy, but (especially with CGNAT) I always felt a little comfortable that correlating someone's online activity long term would take at least a small amount of effort (for businesses, not for governments).

(BTW I know that routing all traffic through a VPN provider takes this mostly off the table, similar to CGNAT but you get to solve a lot more captchas. I still feel like I must be missing something, given the overlap between nerds who like Privacy and nerds who like IPv6 rollout.)

#ipv6 #privacy