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by robin_reala 2127 days ago
I used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.
4 comments

Absent legislation, I'm all for a "nuke it all" approach when it comes to ad-blocking and tracker-blocking. It won't catch everything, especially platform-level privacy concerns like this, but it does move good usable defaults over to the user's control. No need to rely on companies who continue to fail to act in good faith.
You can't block an app or site from accessing your geolocatable IP workout extreme measures.
But IP geolocation has pretty bad resolution. Generally, it can reliably locate country, but rest is a wild guess. E.g. my IP is geolocated to city 300km away (as that is where my ISP has business address).
Is that true even for IPv6?
Yes, because most users will want low latency more than they want a hard-to-geolocate IPv6 address; IOW they will just use the IPv6 addresses their ISP assigns them, which will be easy to geolocate even without the ISP's explicit cooperation. Worse still, because IPv6 promises to eliminate NAT, geolocation will likely become even more precise as user devices will have global addresses that they are not sharing with anyone else.
How can per-device IPv6 addresses alone enable better tracking if they’re long-lived and the device moves physical locations during that time? How would a tracker with only IP address know that the device moved?
A number of ISPs have started using NAT for IPv4 due to the address space crunch, which means that at best those IPv4 addresses can only be used for coarse geolocation. The fact that IPv6 addresses are per-device means that at a minimum you can get household level geolocation for each device (based on the prefix). The fact that addresses are long-lived is not really relevant, since addresses are only long lived with respect to a prefix and prefixes will change when a device moves to a different network (almost always the case with residential service).
I always wonder what would happen if governments legislate that advertisers (or everyone really) have to respect the Do Not Track header.
That's not relevant to the article. The complaint is about data collection and handling that is constant regardless of opts.
I hope said legislation is better thought out than the opt-in cookie laws.