kingfisher241049

BRUSSELS, Belgium - IP addresses, string of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080121/...line_privacy_4

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E.U. privacy experts say that your individual I.P. address should be regarded as personal information protected by EU Law. I am not sure law enforcement would agree when they try to follow your movements on the internet.

ugacrew

Such a waste of time. IP addresses are dynamic in nature anyway and can be spoofed. Hell, I can have an address from Tokyo if I wanted to fool them via an anonymizer. They should pay more attention to MAC addresses. Those never change despite there being logical methods of changing it.

ex_exile

You can change mac addresses too (as I can see you know) but MAC addresses are only really usefull on the local subnet, the original host MAC address does not get transmitted in the IP packet.

IP adresses dymanic in nature? Hummm, well from an end user perspective I guess you could say that but if you were tracking information from companies servers definatly not.

ugacrew

I know you can but most don't think about that judging on how much importance this proposition has placed on just the IP address. It just makes me wonder you know.

Pony

I agree with that. They can be used to identify users. Sure they can be spoofed, but lots of information can also be forged.

Many users have static IP addresses. I don't want Yahoo using the fact that I looked at Toyota's sales web site 20 times last month to start pushing me adverts for car loans :curse:

Roland Hulme

Your computer hacker skills are hot.

ex_exile

You'd be surprised how much privacy infomation is already given under European law, and that global companies are obliged to conform with EU data protection standard for all infomation collected in the EU*. I think they are just making clear that IP's are covered by existing statutes.

* The question is of course did they collect the infomstion from you in Europe or did you give the infomation to their servers in Bermuda.

ugacrew

Gosh I wish I could hack. That would be such a cool thing to do, that's if I knew how to get away with it. I actually want to learn how to for government agencies in order to track down nefarious activity on the net, also known as a white hat hacker. Using an anonymizer is not hacking. Just hiding your surfing patterns for a bit. It's a great tool, however there are drawbacks with using an anonymizer. For one, it slows down browsing because of all the hoops and hurdles packets have to go through in order to hide it's source. Second are the DNS requests that are made at times that give it's requester away. So it's not all what it's cracked out to be. Usually it's used temporarily used for top secret communication and searching bit torrent sites. Am I making you hotter?

ex_exile

Now if you could you just subnet in IPv6 you'd be the perfect woman

Roland Hulme

Excuse me while I turn the thermostat down.

ugacrew

I have enough problems subnetting a 32bit address. You want me to subnet a 128bit one??? You've got to be out of your f***ing mind. If you wanna talk about CIDR then let's party. In the meantime I'll be a smart woman and let an IPv6 subnetting calculator do my work. This woman has her hair and make-up to do.

Roland Hulme

Yeah, I have no idea what you just said, but it was hot.