Re: 64-bit identifiers & traffic analysis

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 12:11 09/08/01, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
>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).

Quite so.  A number of commercial web firms have hired folks
who really understand traffic analysis techniques.  These are
now reasonably widely deployed to track web users/uses from at
least 2 commercial firms that I'm aware of.

Many of the "privacy advocates" don't seem to grasp that the
original IPv6 use of the MAC in the low-order bits wasn't the
big privacy threat -- traffic analysis has always been the 
bigger threat and the IPv6 spec change (though needed to pacify
those "advocates") can't actually resolve that privacy issue.

The world seems like a complicated place these days...(sigh).

Ran
rja@inet.org