I thought the MAC address was effective when we banned it, so I wanted to change it, but according to remlei, this is no longer the case. Another reason is I don't trust my neighbors. I don't want them to see a Mac of PlayStation soon.
He did not say it was no longer the case. Nothing has changed, the situation is identical to what it was on ps3 launch.
He explained to you that your ps3 mac address isn't seen by Sony (or anyone else outside your local private network) if your ps3 is assigned a private IP address by a router using NAT because it is the router's mac address that is used in communication exchanges.
And he concluded that spoofing the mac address to hide it in comms would only make sense if your console was directly assigned a public IP (an IP accessible from a public network ie the Internet).
The problem being that even if you are not exposing your ps3 mac address directly, we don't really know what data Sony psn servers collect by querying the ps3 OS psn interface.
In theory they could collect the ps3 mac address easily through code then send it as data rather than rely on the comm exchange. Now do they really bother? I have no idea. One would need to monitor & debug the whole process, probably reverse engineer part of it too, in order to get an idea of what data is collected & transmitted. We know some things for sure, those have been addressed with psnpatch & sen enabler, but much is still hypothetical, doubts remain.
And of course, there is also the issue of games & online gaming services. Games have full access to userland & syscalls, in theory a game can send any of the data available from userland to a game server. That includes the console's mac address of course among many other things. When a game maker reports a user to Sony for a ban request, do they pass on the mac address? I cannot say, it's possible & in any case I don't think it's being paranoid to assume for instance that game makers whose game servers get frequent abuse (but maybe many others as well) may collect this kind of personal data, especially if the PSN T&C does not strictly forbid it.
Moreover considering that personal data collection is a big thing being monetized nowadays, it would be naive to think that the gaming industry (at least part of it) aren't collecting as much of it as they can as long as it is legally sound to do so.
