Static IP on Zen - is it compulsory?

As the subject line really - I don't want a static IP, but I like the look of Zen otherwise. Can you opt out?

I don't know that you can as having stable IPv4 and IPv6 allocations inclusive in the base price is one of the attractive features they use to distinguish offerings from cheaper/bulk market providers.
AAISP and IDNet similarly offer as standard.

Can you achieve what you want (which sounds like being able to mask your IP) from time to time using a free VPN (e.g. Hide.me) or anonymising proxy provider as you would be able to toggle that on/off as needed.

Thanks for reply.

To be clear the intention is to confuse marketers, rather than anything more nefarious.

Browsing via VPN or proxy probably makes you stand out more than just having a naturally churning dynamic IP.

Seems a shame you can only get that from the less competent ISPs.

Basic efforts to block ads, marketing trackers and to reduce browser fingerprinting are far more important and effective than a dynamic IP. I'm as privacy conscious as anyone when it comes to all the surveillance capitalism but your IP address is honestly just one small thing that can be used to follow you around.

The static IP is one of the things that made me switch to Zen in the first place. Functionality gained from it outweighs the tracking concerns.

In reply to a post by ipfreely2020:

To be clear the intention is to confuse marketers, rather than anything more nefarious.

Globally the number of people behind CGNAT (including ALL mobile connections), as well as all those browsing from work, means this is not something the marketers look at.

Yes marketing really does not care about IP since they expect anything between 1 and 1000 devices to be behind each IP especially people browsing from behind a corporate environment or CGNAT.

It's still a factor in geo-blocking (even though for IPv4 this is somewhat misguided if trying to keep up with rate at which blocks are being traded or leased) but not for browser tracking.

And the downsides on dynamic or mass-shared public IP include being more likely to be caught up in some blocklist waiting to age out or see even more captchas.

In reply to a post by ipfreely2020:

Thanks for reply.

To be clear the intention is to confuse marketers, rather than anything more nefarious.

Browsing via VPN or proxy probably makes you stand out more than just having a naturally churning dynamic IP.

Seems a shame you can only get that from the less competent ISPs.

Your browser gives away way more useful information than an IP address would to be honest.

Point taken about blocklists, that's about the only disadvantage I can see of having a dynamic IP (unless you want to run servers/VPNs/restrict services to accepting sign-in from a single IP. None of that bothers me tbh).

But although everyone here seems quite confident marketers don't care about address IP - I'm not sure that is necessarily true.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/11/google_proxy_...

If IP address really doesn't matter, why fight this?

An IP address is just one more datapoint among a terrifying number of datapoints, but I don't think any of the marketers have met a datapoint they don't like yet.

Combine the IP address with the ISP, and the knowledge that particular ISP only issues static IPs, and what may be mere noise at one ISP becomes a strong signal at another.

Having read the article the main objection seems to be those advertisers believing this gives Google preferential access to certain information that will be obscured from others, thereby conferring some advantage, and another section about whether it makes it any harder to track down sources of CSAM material.

There is some confusion around the what it means when it is a dual layer proxy system (Google + Cloudflare)

However none of what was discussed really makes having a dynamic ISP address at home an advantage.
And it does not change the simple truth that 2 connections from the same public IP can no longer regarded as being the same person or even necessarily the same household.

The IP alone has not been meaningful since the days that a dial-up modem attached to a single computer placed that device (and not a router) directly onto the Internet during a session.

The proliferation of mobile phones means that most people don't get their own unique IPv4 on mobile data connections either and when on Wi-Fi they roam between connections and mobile data so the marketers had to abandon that reliance.
Likewise how logged in sesssions and shopping baskets are managed has to survive the IP not being an indicator of being the same client sesssion.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 13-Nov-23 21:11:20)

I should add that on the ISPs that offer dual stack and with IPv6 availability and adoption nearing 50%,
your browsing will increasingly be coming from an address that changes frequently anyway thanks to Privacy / Temporary Address Extensions.

My connection to this forum is coming from a temporary v6 with less than 1 hour of validity remaining.

You'll lose that if you go with a cheaper option such as PlusNet.

Edited by prlzx (Mon 13-Nov-23 21:31:12)