Actually, hiding the SSID is not a good practice. It's worthless as a "security" measure. Worse, it's much better to let your neighbors see which channel you are on. Otherwise you can end up with a pile-up of several hidden SSID networks on the same channel, and, of course, with a horrible performance.

Local? Check again. Your ISP will assign you a whole prefix (/64 or even a /48). Each node in your network will have a *valid* *routable* IPv6 address. And those addresses can be assigned manually (this won't be common), or automatically. And automatically assigned addressed can be derived from the MAC address, or will be generated randomly as temporary addresses.

At the end, the publicly visible IPv6 address will indeed contain your MAC address unless the random generated temporary addresses are used.

"There's no big table of data somewhere that connects your MAC address to specific person. It's not even remotely the same as an IP address".

Correction: it's not even remotely the same as an IPv4 address.

Now, check the addressing schemes for IPv6. You'll find out that one of the mechanisms to create an IPv6 address, extender EUI-64, is _precisely_ building it from a MAC address, which indeed is fully readable in the reslting IPv6 address.

Of course there's a better scheme that uses temporary addresses, but let's see which one gets a more widespread usage.

Seems like they would enjoy some Sc(...)tology treatment, maybe?

It's very simple: back in the old days, when there was no monopoly, many chip manufacturers gave away thick, printed databooks. It was expensive for them, but they needed developers to use their products.

Now, however, there is a monopoly. You don't need to attract developers. The only concern is to have a driver for Windows, and having that driver included with the Windows install disk, so that your device, be it a soundcard, graphics card, or whatever, is "easier" to use. I wonder if there is a "dark hand" behind it...

Some years ago I sent a proposal to the European Comission: banning the sale in Europe of peripherals for which there is no public interface information available. It should not hurt the manufacturers, as the information can be made freely available in Internet (it's cheaper than shipping huge printed manuals), but it would have a side effect: the driver advantage for Window could disappear.