The Internet was not engineered to preserve privacy and is rapidly becoming "the" communication network. European Union policies on data protection demand a better understanding of the tradeoffs between the benefits and privacy risks of new Internet technology.
Maintaining location or traffic information confidential like the transmitted data are key provisions of the new European regulatory framework for electronic communications infrastructure. The EU aims to adapt and update the existing Data Protection Directive to take into account new technologies and to empower users to control their personal information. However, it is not well understood how this policy and the underlying Internet technology can be brought into alignment. For example, the current IPv6 method of automatic device configuration results in a readily observable and recognizable identifier, in spite of a roaming user.
This talk will present a number of privacy threats in the next generation Internet and the ongoing efforts in the research community to handle them, focusing on RFC3041 and location privacy in (hierarchical) MobileIPv6.