I believe there are dynamic ip addresses that do not link to an indivdual.
Also, I believe currently, this information is not centralized and it is not available to government or anyone else unless there is due cause...sadly I believe patriot act did away with necessity of warrant.
I am concerned because I believe a digital identifier would be possible to track purchases as well as political (or any other) thot. Also, in many ways, the government is inept; I have no doubt that such data bases could be hacked and our information could be stollen, modified, etc.
It is a really baaaaad idea!!!!!!!!!!!
No IP, dynamic or static, can identify a person. They only identify a computer. But those records are kept, so a dynamic IP doesn't protect the identity of a computer. The ISP knows which box asked for a dynamic IP by its MAC address, and the MAC address is globally unique unless tampered with. Very few people know how to do that.
But it is technically possible to implement a system like one in airports, for example. Anyone can turn the laptop on and connect to a wireless hot spot. But the only page you get is the sign-on page. There you have to type your name and password, and then you will be allowed onto the network. This can be implemented by consumer level ISPs.
But business level ISPs can't do that. This is because too much communication in business occurs not between people but between computers. Those boxes need Internet access, but they aren't associated with any particular human, and they are not controlled by that human when they do their Windows updates or remote backup / rsync or web serving or SMTP mail or whatever.
One more possibility is to mandate that all US web sites only serve content to US visitors who are authenticated. But that will backfire because we'll be reading Asian news instead, and they are far less favorable to Obama than the local media. Google will go out of business, and Baidu will become #1 (we don't care what Chinese gov't collects about us, and neither does the Chinese gov't.)
Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. “I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to,” he said. There's no chance that “a centralized database will emerge,” and “we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this,” he said.
Yup. Absolutely no chance. Right. Absolutely.