[neya]

This is a well thought, excellent comment that perfectly makes sense. Thank you. When huge corporations track you as how they are tracking you currently, most of the times, they don't get to know who you really are (except Facebook, because they know 'you'). That is, your identity. That's the only level of control you have over your anonymity. And these guys are proposing a new protocol just to remove that. Ridiculous.

[maggit]

I suspect you are reading too much into the word "identity". It is just a matter of identifying the endpoint, so the HTTP router can delegate requests from one user to the same backend instance in any given session. This, in turn, will give a user a consistent image of the state at the server independently of cache propagation in the backend. For example. You don't need the user's real life identity to do this, and you don't need the same identity across different sites or across different sessions.

This is currently sometimes done by cookies, which makes life difficult for HTTP routers. He is proposing a mechanism to keep the identifying-part while getting rid of problems in the HTTP router layer. The way I read this, it seemed to be without introducing additional privacy concerns and in fact removing some. (Cookies can carry more than identity)

There is a detailed technical discussion to be had about implementing all of this, and in this discussion any privacy concerns would become visible and open for discussion. But I think it is a leap to say that the comments in TFA would necessarily make for a world bereft of privacy ;)