This is a perspective I've never really thought about, and it's worth considering in more detail. On the one hand, wouldn't it be nice if devices could just send packets back and forth, like in the "good old days" before firewalls and NATs? IPv6 has the potential to eliminate a lot of the hackiness of the current IPv4 world.

That said, I remember in the early days of home DSL and cable modems that some ISPs would try to say "you only get 1 device at home", and NATs were the way you told them to buzz off. You sell me bandwidth and get out of my way.

So what's the solution? I'm not convinced that NATs do much for privacy these days. Even if you're running all your traffic through SSL, there are all sorts of telltales that fingerprint your TCP stack, and your DNS activity, all by itself, is quite telling about who you are and what you've got going on in your network. IMHO, the solution to this isn't better technology to hide ourselves, but rather better regulation that says what ISPs can and cannot collect.

For example, AT&T Gigapower is now available in my neighborhood, but I've been resisting the upgrade because I'm not interested in their privacy violation engine, although it appears that in advance of Congressional hearings on related topics, AT&T just killed the program and now everybody gets a more traditional privacy policy. For now.