Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

I guess this is why people always said it was impossible to remove the watermark that appears when you are not activated, when it was rolled out many years ago.

Defeating the reasons for activation might’ve lead the more tech-savvy to figuring out the nature of the identifiers being sent for activation and seeing where else they are sent.