Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a GDID tracker with no off switch, first documented publicly in an FBI hacker complaint (www.windowslatest.com)

submitted 4 days ago by leogeee777@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://tardigram.com/m/windows11@lemmy.world/t/39011

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

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[–] Gork@sopuli.xyz 18 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I wonder how many other GDID type identifiers are out there, besides this Microsoft one.

[–] defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I'd bet every proprietary OS (or open source base OS with deeply integrated proprietary software, such as anything Google makes) has something similar.

For things like phones, an IMEI is already a permenantly attached unique ID tied to the modem. There is also a hardcoded serial number in most electronic devices.

[–] sompreno@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago

With hardware fingerprinting it doesn't really matter that much

[–] ms_lane@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Processor_Serial_Number

27 years ago...

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

Most CPUs don't allow you to read the serial number anymore (from userspace at least, I'm sure there are ways of extracting it).

Except Raspberry Pi for some reason, and for some other reason my coworker decided to use that as a device identifier for one of our services (devices we build and control, we're not just tracking random people). So now I guess we're stuck with raspberry pis for the near future. On any other device it just returns "ERR00000“.