Most of the things I do with memorised addresses have nothing to do with the browser or HTTP. (Mind you, though, the moment a browser won't let me access a bare

Most of the things I do with memorised addresses have nothing to do with the browser or HTTP. (Mind you, though, the moment a browser won't let me access a bare IP, I'm switching away from that browser.) Me too. Wireshark, nmap and co are in regular use in my job. All browsers are playing nanny, more and more apart from the likes of Links (which I also use quite often). A lack of https is already flagged and I suspect that things will get worse in this regard. Links2 has saved my bacon many times in the past so you may enjoy it 8) You are worried about the likes of Google and Facebook profiling you No mate. I'm CREST accredited: I'm not worried about G and F profiling me - I know they do. However I also know that my choice of addressing scheme does not affect my privacy whatsoever. A carrier can use metadata to derive loads of facts about your usage even if you are connecting to the oher end over say https. NAT will save you from some silly firewall screw ups but not much else. A VPN can help but is no silver bullet either. If I really put my mind to it I could probably make myself near enough anonymous with enough use of proxies, VPNs and TOR but I'm not too sure about that! I too am from the UK and have seen silly overreactions such as your [1] link. However, this is the world we have nowadays and in our case we have a horrific level of CCTV pointed at us as well as some pretty impressive levels of IP traffic mining. We also have the rather unpleasant RIP Act and a few others to belie our supposed liberal way of life in the UK. You do have to be careful what you say nowadays, within reason.