Re: The Internet and the Law, the Economist, 13-19 January 2001

> I will say however that I concur with the comment in §4 ibid., "The
> desires of protecting individual privacy vs. the desire to effectively
> maintain and debug a network can conflict with each other."    It will
> be interesting to see how the IPv6 architecture will evolve now
> that these issues are being given more attention, given that some
> architectures will have greater conflict than others.
I hope that the architecture evolves in such a way as to let
individual users (or network admins, whatever)  make that choice
for themselves, rather than having it presumed by either 
the architecture or implementations.

Some hosts and applications and users need stable addresses more
than they need the degree of privacy protection which they would
get from having randomized addresses.  Others have different needs.
(and in some cases the needs conflict even for an individual user)

Also, the risk of having your machine serial number leaked to the
net (as in stateless address autoconfiguration) is subtly different
from the inherent risk of having a stable IP address.  One might
quite reasonably be willing to accept the latter but not the former.

Keith