Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Am I wrong here that all the emphasis on fingerprint protection is largely moot when not using a proxy? The entire design of IP networking means you’re fingerprintable by IP, doubly so on IPv6?

View on HN

You still have a fingerprintable IP with a proxy. It's just a slightly different set of integers.

This is one of the reasons for Apple to build "iCloud Private Relay" [1], so you at least have a new IP address every so often.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212614

Multiple people can share one IP

I mean yes, with NAT, especially on IPv4 but fingerprinting at the household level still seems exceedingly valuable.

Most people are on dynamic IP's.

They’re usually not actually that dynamic. I’m on Comcast and my IP hasn’t changed since before COVID/wfh started. I know because I have to update my works whitelist for the VPC every time it does.

Even if it changed weekly, that’s valuable data. How many websites do you access in that time?

Using a common household internet access here in Germany, i.e. consumer level, one gets assigned a new IP roughly every 24 hours.

Yeah. I could get a static IP for 5€/month, but besides that everything is dynamic.

This greatly varies between ISPs. We too have such a whitelist for wfh. Some people have had the same IP for years. Others have a different IP every week, sometimes even more frequently.

There is also CGNAT which is used by mobile provider and increasingly on fixed line internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com