[102050] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: EU Official: IP Is Personal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Brunner-Williams)
Wed Jan 23 23:39:20 2008
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:30:53 -0800
From: Eric Brunner-Williams <brunner@nic-naa.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20080124004455.GA64360@metron.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Lou Katz wrote:
> They are both right. If you have a dynamic IP such as most college
> students
> have, it is here-today-gone-tomorrow.
>
> If you have static IP (business, us slugs in the Swamp, etc) you are identifyable.
>
Hi Lou,
Long time.
The thing is this isn't an atemporal question. The association of an
address and any other information that tends
to identify an individual (say my googling the complete works of the
co-author of "Survey of Modern Algebra",
along with Saunders MacLaine, in particular reference [1], the
"original" treatise on shaped charges, and my
groveling for clue in DNS ops, and my ...) tends to unique closure over
finite time.
So, for a single datagram sourced from a just-allocated at random DHCP
pool, wicked hard to make PII.
But for many hours or days of stream to a variety of data collectors,
some of which share raw or correlated data,
the problem is not insoluable.
Eric
[1] Garret Birkhoff, et al. "Explosives With Lined Cavities". Journal of
Applied Physics. June 1948, p. 563-582.
