this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Here's how to fix IPv6:
Don't do IPv6.
And here's the simple reason why: the IPv6 address space is so huge every device can be assigned its own, easily-tracked fixed IP, which is a bonanza for the techno-fascist Big Data companies.
The very raison d'etre of IPv6 - which is to solve the IPv4 address scarcity problem and do away with all the nasty hacks to get around it - was desirable before surveillance capitalism, when the internet wasn't a dangerous, adversarial place. Now you want IPv4 NAT and masquerading, to make tracking you a little bit harder.
Engineers did actually anticipate this, y’know. There are IPv6 privacy extensions and Windows auto randomizes your MAC now
Great in theory, not so great for simple automations like seeing of people are home based on connected MAC addresses instead of relying on an app (that can't even run on the background consistently on modern mobile OSes).
Sure it is, you can disable it per-SSID on iPhones
you can easily periodically switch to randomly generated new addresses if you are so paranoid.. your conspiracy theory doesn't make sense.
and like, your mac address is already globally unique, are you worried about those too?
You can do that in your computer. Not so much in embedded devices.
MAC addresses are far from unique (they're only 6 bytes long). And MAC address aren't encoded in IP packets.
if it's an embedded device you don't fully control, the company that made it can track it with or without ipv6. and if you do fully control its software then you surely can make it change ip addresses
There's like two people's devices behind my router. The amount of benefit I get to hiding which device is sending traffic is pretty meaningless. And all my user devices are using privacy extensions anyway.
I don't quite understand what you're trying to prevent. Like if I have an iot device that doesn't support privacy extensions, who am I making the tracking harder for by using ipv4? Anything the device talks to already is probably tracking via the device authenticating in the first place. And anybody in the middle doesn't really learn much by knowing that a particular device is sending opaque traffic vs the house is sending opaque traffic.
Big tech tracks us because we voluntarily login to their services. And they do so mainly to sell us ads. If you don't want them tracking you, hiding IP doesn't help much. Like don't login to their services and block requests to their domains to prevent third party site integrations. If you need to use their services anyway, then you're fundamentally screwed.
Why would the IPv6 addresses issued to you by your ISP be any less traceable than the one IPv4 address they typically give you? It’s fairly obvious which group of devices are related.
oooh, the ipv6 evangelist are gonna hate this.🍿
To be clear: IPv6 IS the correct and elegant technical solution to the exhausted IPv4 address space, and I was very much in favor of it for many years. In fact, I deplored that its rollout, which should have been swift and forceful, never truly happened in earnest.
But that was before corporate surveillance. Now I always downgrade to IPv4, not out of technical necessity, but out of a sense of self-preservation.
Although I'm very well aware that corporate surveillance doesn't rely solely on tracking IPs anymore. But there's no sense in giving the sumbitches an easy way to track you when you don't have to.
@ExtremeDullard
Isn‘t that what firewalls are for?
Firewalls don't hide your IP. Maybe you're thinking of VPNs.
Just put your devices on a subnet that doesn't have Internet access.