The more you try to hide, the more attention you attract. -- Anon - the movie
Anonymizing one's self is difficult. Technology companies are coming up with surprising ways to bypass the cloak of 'leave me alone' we attempt to wrap around ourselves. From a news group, here is an interesting mechanism describing the continuing escalation:
The statement of purpose:
To augment what many already have said here - it's a tie between IP address and household address and name/surname that should not be public, the address itself is mostly harmless and it doesn't matter if it's static or dynamic. Tracing gets done on L7 and above anyway
The statement of bypass:
In the current state of the web, if a user gets a new address, the various web surveillance mechanisms will associate it with the previous user identity and context after maybe a dozen web queries or two. That gets better if the user has a strong defensive posture, blocks web trackers, etc. But it just takes one cookie, or one login, or some other inference, and poof, the surveillance databases know that new_address_X is the same user as old_address_Y.
The case of the household is even worse. It takes only one cookie, login, etc, and the surveillance databases will learn that new_prefix_P is the same household as old_prefix_Q. Even you run Ghostery or Privacy Badger or the latest release of Firefox, you won't escape if you share a prefix with someone in your household who doesn't. Or with one of those surveillance devices that masquerade as thermostats or light switches or voice assistants.
So that's pretty bleak. If you want defense, you probably want to allocate different /64 prefixes to different devices, and change them really often. You may not need to change them for every devices -- no point providing privacy to the surveillance thermostat. But for your laptop, your tablet or your phone, they to change before the surveillance advertisers see you access a dozen web pages or two.
-- Christian Huitema
To help the discussion of how matching identifying information can be quite easy, take the following tests with your browser:
- Am I Unique - Learn how identifiable you are on the Internet
- Panopticlick - is your browser safe against tracking?
Background info on browser fingerprinting and tracking:
- What Is It and What Should You Do About It?
- Why you see online ads for stuff you buy in the real world
To finish things off, another quote from Anon - the movie:
It is not that I have something to hide, it is that I have nothing I want you to see
