Re: 64-bit identifiers

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: Bob Hinden <hinden@IPRG.nokia.com>

    > I suspect that any new scheme using global identifiers will have to
    > deal with privacy issues to allow for anonymous communication.

If you look at things like HIP, they provide identifiers that are both
completely anonymous as well as long-lived and globally unique. It's now
understood that the abiltity to provide anonymity is a requirement.

Of course, for the really paranoid, they don't like long-lived unique
identifiers of any kind, because they allow correlation of activity, which
may allow identification through out-of-channel means. So for them, there's
*no* identifier scheme that will keep them happy. Kind of hard to work around
that requirement....

On the other hand, I have it on good authority that various commercial
activities are now tracking people on dialins without use of any kind of
identifier (e.g. HTML cookies) - they do it by some sort of activity
analysis. So the cost/benefit analysis (pro, utility of long-lived global
name, con, security issues) may still tip toward providing them (with a tip
of the hat toward the anonymity issue, which is relatively easy to provide,
of course).

And of course, for the really paranoid, they can just keep creating new
ones for every transaction.... :-)

	Noel