I paid a visit to Green Bank WV once out of an interest in astronomy. The giant radio telescopes are truly a sight to behold!
Less impressive were the people camped out nearby who saw the place as the promised land where they could cast off their tinfoil hats in the cellular-banned zone surrounding the complex.
When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I'm guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There's a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.