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.