PRIVACY campaigners are up in arms over plans for a new Internet transmission
standard that can add information to e-mails and Web requests that identifies
the sender鈥檚 computer.
The growth of the Web has prompted the Internet Engineering Task Force, an
open community of those concerned with the Net鈥檚 evolution
(see www.ietf.org),
to develop a new transmission standard that provides more
addresses than the current Internet protocol, which limits addresses to 32 bits.
The proposed new protocol, called IP version 6 (IPv6), includes a 128-bit ID tag
that can include the serial number of the computer鈥檚 Ethernet card.
But campaigners at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington
say that this means IPv6 addresses will be permanently embedded in hardware,
unlike those of the existing standard. They say that IPv6, like the serial
numbers in the Intel Pentium III, is a 鈥減otential challenge to online
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However, IETF member Scott Brader of Harvard University, says the protests
are overblown. Only the privacy of those accessing the Net via an Ethernet
network will be threatened, and even then, a network card code is only used when
a service provider chooses to make this a default address for the user鈥攁nd
Brader predicts that will rarely happen.