The reason why we use IP addresses is so that when somebody searches up your IP on the internet, they won't know who you are.
As a software engineer with 10 years experience... no. That has nothing whatsoever to do with why we use IP addresses. It's just an address scheme.
This terrible change in law allows ISP's to sell information about you, but that has nothing to do with your IP address.
However, I would point out that it was literally only government protection preventing the sale of said information in the first place.
I would also point out that it was the Left Liberal Democrats who tried to stop this and keep our privacy.
I do hope the guy who created Cards Against Humanity goes forward with his plan to buy the browser history of anyone who voted in favor of this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cards-against-humanity-creator-wants-to-buy-congresss-browser-history/
Ok, but what I meant to say was that the IP address system adds a layer of obfuscation.
I mean the IP protocol could have easily been your ID number on your ID car or SSN. But they choose an arbitrary numbering system that doesnt contain your identity.
Now with this move, this layer of separation will become nonexistent and it would be as if the IP number would be your ID number, because everyone can have access to your private data, either directly or through leaks.
I know, i start to agree with the left more and more on social issues, but I cant agree on economic issues.
After all this is what libertarianism was supposed to mean, socially liberal but economically conservative.
But this new alt-right, national libertarianism, is just ridiculous. It's totally fascist, but also has neo-nazi elements.
Huh... steemit never notified me you replied.
Well... yes and no. The entity that assigns your IP does know your identity. You're right about the level of "obfuscation" but that's really so that things can be layered and swapped out. You wouldn't want to use the "card's" address because if you were running a server or something and changed servers, you'd want people to reach it at the same address. That's more at the server level, while at the consumer level each ISP has a pool of IP Addresses that it can assign dynamically. This allows them to have more users by taking away IP addresses if they aren't being used and reassigning them. (There's actually some concern about running our of IP addresses which is why IPV6 was created, but it doesn't appear people are really moving to that as most everything currently supports both for legacy reasons.)
It's not really about the IP address though, it's about the ISP. At the consumer level that's not even a good way to go about it, most ISP's regularly change your IP address unless you specifically request a static IP. For instance in some places your IP address literally changes every few seconds. So by looking up what an IP address has done you could be seeing what my neighbor looked at yesterday. You really need the correlation with the identity information and address assignment from the ISP...
But what this deregulation really is, is the ISP can sell that info to people. They have all the records tying your network history to your identity either independent of your IP or correlated with it at the times it was assigned to you. Right now they can't sell it, but Republicans are removing that protection.
I brought it up because I vaguely remember a thread from you a few weeks ago attacking liberals. :P
I don't think the alt-right has anything to do with libertarianism. Libertarians just sometimes get mixed in because they follow the economic conservative stuff, and the economic conservatives put a lot of effort into denigrating liberals so libertarians end up sounding like conservatives. But that's the problem... conservative ideals have been proven bad, so their only means to gain power has been to create an "us vs them" playing field where they try to convince people that the Left is a threat to the country.
When the reality is, in the free market you'd argue for ISP's would already be selling your info. :P