As the connected world moves toward Internet Protocol version Six (IPv6), privacy concerns have emerged, and in a report by The Register, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved Request for Comments (RFC) 7217, which attempts to avoid persistent tracking across the web. The RFC, also called “A Method for Generating Semantically Opaque Interface Identifiers with IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration” (SLAAC) states, “Since the resulting interface identifiers are constant across networks, the resulting IPv6 addresses can be leveraged to track and correlate the activity of a host across multiple networks … thus negatively affecting the privacy of users.” The SLAAC RFC offers a partial fix, the report states, by having a host’s address change when moving to a new network.
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