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Comment by para_parolu | Hacker News Reader

Question from someone who don’t know much about IP. Isn’t ipv4 better for privacy from practical standpoint? Most of the time users are behind bunch of NATs. And with ipv6 premise (I may be wrong here) it “public ip for every device”. Which should make it easier to track people.

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While end devices are usually behind NATs, most ISPs out there still ensure that every customer has a unique public facing IP address which is tied to them long term. My own residential IP (with Comcast) hasn't changed in years.

There's NAT and then there's CGNAT and basically all of the new wave ISPs are using it.

But, I'd rather deal with the cgnat annoyances than ever have a financial relationship with Mediacom again.

ISPs in Singapore for example absolutely store mapping of your name+your CGNAT RFC6598 IP + port.

Regulatory compliance?

It is. Also that data is stored for 3+ years.

There is a router with one IP address. If there is more than one user/device behind the router, how are you going to have IP address for each user?

This issue was resolved 15 years ago[1][2]

Nearly every IPv6 capable device supports the privacy extensions, and most systems turn them on by default. I know Windows, Mac and, Linux do. Android got some shit a few years back because they removed the privacy extensions from Android, but I believe they are also now available on that ad-platform as well.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...

Short answer is not entirely.

Most home internet still has unique public IPv4 in the US. There is technically nothing stopping a mobile operator from granting its endpoints fresh IPv6 addresses frequently.

It is. People here are fervently pro-ipv6 and won't admit it, but your theory is completely right.

If I put my Conspiracy Hat on, the reason they just did not Extend ipV4 to just add some more address space is to purposefully eliminate Privacy on the internet

There is a huge number of people that believe in things like a "Real Names Policy", and that Anonymous Access to the internet was a mistake, These people hold positions of power in organizations that make the standards.

Na, it's just that ipv6 was conceived when the ideas of privacy on the internet weren't advanced enough.

The ideas of privacy were, but not the idea that someone really would go through the effort to store connection information for the purpose of surveillance. Naturally, because that still is a perversion.

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