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.
Something this article glosses over is the fact that Microsoft knew all of the web URLs he was visiting. I don’t know if that’s because he was dumb enough to sign into Edge with his Microsoft account or if they were collecting that a different way, but the GDID wouldn’t have been nearly as useful without that info.
And able to identify the specific accounts he was logging into. How are they able to do that?
Edge can save passwords and creds, much like any credential manager.
IDK either. But so much is now like, ppl wanting privacy have to be right every time. The co’s wanting our data, only once! A single hidden backdoor siphon to our data and we didn’t protect ourself from it. A single telemetry that encodes every URL we visit. A single statistical way to fingerprint us.
That Sisyphus dude knows our pain.
Year of the Linux desktop anyone?
Seems like the answer is never. The masses are too addicted to PC games to give it up.
Linux is PC…
Also you can play almost all games on linux
The same user posted a thread in this comm about the Linux equivalent, device-id, which is possibly more problematic.
The complaint quotes a Microsoft representative describing the GDID as “a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios”
A Global Device ID (GDID) is a permanent, unique digital fingerprint that Microsoft automatically assigns to your computer when you install Windows or sign into a Microsoft account.
