Will IPv6 Be A Threat To Privacy?
I’ve just noticed this on my favourite law news site. Law news is so much more interesting and thought-provoking than other kinds of news, and this piece certainly got me thinking.
Widespread adoption of IPv6 is generally regarded as being part of the next stage of Internet development. The ability to assign unique address to literally anything and anyone on earth obviously opens up a large number of possibilities.
But this makes the French ruling rather worrying. If IP addresses are not personal information, this means IPv6 may well become the platform for a surveillance-based network the likes of which we have only just begun to see in our current IPv4-based world.
Yeah and of course our introduction of the data retention directive and now the digital economy bill is some of the zealous in ヨーロッパ。
I’m really not sure how we’re going to free ourselves from politicians who don’t understand, or won’t understand, technology. Perhaps there needs to be an equivalent of Law Lords (Tech Lords?) who have the final say on matters of technical legislation. Right now, it seems the only hope of any balanced debate on most issues come from the odd MP who has happened to have read a BoingBoing post.
Well Uber Tech Lord should be Earl of Erroll – I think that is a very good idea actually – I shall raise with some people I know … I tried to get an amendment to DEB tabled yesterday via Lord Clement Jones of (120a infamy) but he was told it was too great a variation for a third reading – strict rules apply at this stage – but he tried. Educational establishments and libraries will now focus on MPs.
One Tech Lord is good, but technology, like the law, is something most MPs haven’t a clue about.
There are MPs who seriously think that making sex offenders register their email addresses with the police would allow them to be tracked down on line. They also think that DRM is a silver bullet; that implementing web filtering is trivial, and that ISPs can easily monitor their customers. And that’s just the stuff that’s relevant to the Internet. Wait until nano and bio technology start taking off…