With current VPN services that hide your identity I am fairly certain they do so by having all the users connect to the internet using one public IP using NAT. The users log into the servers but the servers never store who is logged in at any given point in time.
With IPv6 I was reading that NAT was not even built into the standards. VPN’s could only act as a one to one proxy, but that would not really provide any degree of anonymity because you could now ask the VPN company what IP address corresponds to what IP address.
I am hoping that I am missing something or have something wrong. If so I would greatly appreciate some further explanation on how IPv6 will really work.
VPNs are not designed for anonymity, but for privacy. Not even Tor makes you completely anonymous. Each service typically has at least one piece of information that can be used to distinguish different users. This information may not reveal private details, but it can be used to associate it with other information to eventually identify an individual.
Someone else can go into IPv6, but I just wanted to make sure you realized that using a VPN does not make you anonymous - IPv4 or IPv6.
TL:DR VPN =/= Anonymity, but Privacy.
IPv6 supports privacy extensions, which frequently changes your source IP address. I imagine that a commercial VPN service aimed at privacy-conscious users would support privacy extensions.
No change to VPNs in 6, you’ll still torrent the same way.
With current VPN services that hide your identity I am fairly certain they do so by having all the users connect to the internet using one public IP using NAT.
Therein lies your confusion. A VPN doesn’t NAT your connection. A VPN establishes a link between one endpoint and the other. If Comcast ran a VPN server and you connected to it from your Time Warner internet connection, then Time Warner sees that you talk a lot to a Comcast IP. The rest of the world sees that you are sourcing traffic from a Comcast IP (not Time Warner). That’s not NAT. You could say that it’s Comcast tunnelling one of their IPs to you.
There may be a chance that a VPN provider is running NAT on its customers, but it has nothing to do with VPN.
privacy through encryption
Thank you for helping me to better understand the concept!
This was my exact confusion. Thank you!