Does anyone have any real evidence that Amazon can/does get your Mac Address?
There is no way they can unless they are running some kind of Java applet, which you would most likely have to authorize/download/or would notice running.
I see a lot of people going on about this Mac address tracking, but I believe it is just speculation.
I run Amazon accounts with no steps taken for Mac address and haven't had accounts linked.
Discovering a MAC address from an IP Address is only possible if the queried network is externally running ARP or NDP. These are not run on the internet, only on an internal network. Therefore MAC addresses are not available outside your local network. ARP is not a route-able protocol; there is no way you could get the MAC of a visitor to your site unless they were on the same network.
Amazon will see the MAC of the device which forwarded the packet to the server, likely their border router(s).
In IPv6, the 64 bit "host" part of the full 128 bit address is often automatically generated from the MAC address, and hence might be visible to the server one connects to, but that is a long stretch and as it stands noone is probably using IPv6 for Amazon.
I graduated university as an electrical engineer/technologist specializing in microcontrollers and networking. |