I was a big fan of Microsoft ten to fifteen years ago. I’ve since transitioned my whole family off Microsoft products now over to Linux, Apple, and proton. Edit: and Brave.
I really thought their corporate culture would’ve changed after the late 90’s but I guess this is a good lesson for founders. The culture you build into your company will likely outlast your tenure.
I don't like the idea of a persistent id for my machine. Would there be any harm in rewriting the machine-id at every boot? Or just deleting it as part of the shutdown sequence?
Whatever you do there will always be uniquely identifiable information (if not an id, a fingerprint) on your machine.
If you want to escape that, you have to use dedicated privacy-enhancing tools / browsers, but even then, it's very likely that you can still be identified by motivated adversaries.
It doesn't mean you have to give up, but, if such id is necessary for technical reasons in systemd (I guess it is), I wouldn't worry too much.
This sounds like you're referring to state actors and intelligence agencies, but really this applies to the entire advertising/surveillance industry of people trying to sell you a new flavor of soda.
Sure, but the problem then is not systemd machineid, but rather the browser reading it and making it available for such identification (don't know if there is a browser out there doing that though).
Unless anonymization is provided by your browser, there is nothing you can do to prevent such identification technology run by these advertisers to build your profile, and send you targeted ads.
That puts the OS in the position of attempting to profile or determine if an application is accessing OS, hardware, and user details to build a fingerprint, vs using those capabilities to do something the user intends, which puts the OS developer into a performance sucking, soul sucking arms race against big and little brother surveillance/advertising platforms. I absolutely support the intention, just know that it's a brutal battle :(
The OS already does this for a living. A set of identifiers requested sporadically by an app can’t be what breaks its back. Isn’t iOS already doing something similar?
And petty criminals that set up fake fake websites to steal your money, ad-networks are also commonly used to spread malware so limiting the number of attack surfaces is the only sane thing to do.
When you go really hard with the privacy-enhancing tools, you can potentially just make yourself even more visible. When you're so far outside the normal way a user looks you're making yourself even more unique than if you had normal-ish looking identifiers.
It can take a lot of effort to make yourself truly just blend in and disappear.
The DUID is designed to be unique across all DHCP clients and servers, and stable for any specific client or server. That is, the DUID used by a client or server SHOULD NOT change over time if at all possible; for example, a device's DUID should not change as a result of a change in the device's network hardware or changes to virtual interfaces
Not using Chrome is a better bet for privacy than not using systemd or D-Bus. If you sign into Chrome (which by default happens any time you sign into a Google product), your entire browsing history is logged on Google's servers, and tied to your email address, Android ID, and any other machine identifiers Chrome can read.
Anyone serious about privacy is using Firefox or Tor Browser, with various settings to harden it against tracking.
Other BSDs don’t have that, but have equivalent PCI tree identifiers. “hostid”, too, is found on many systems but is much less unique as it’s often a function of local network address.
I went to check if Flatpak would protect against this but it seems although it's a wanted feature it's not so straightforward to implement: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4311
I have the urge to grab a pitchfork, but I know better than to make assumptions about why that functionality was added. Time to do some homework I guess.
The utility of and presence of unique identifiers in software should be no surprise.
But if you are using TelemetryOS (i.e. you cannot fully switch off the chatter) and your daily Web browser doesn't offer privacy extensions, you are the product.
In dbus, it seems the feature is intended for two processes to know they can access the same shmem and other system resources. I'm struggling to understand in which circumstances would that be useful.
Creating an excuse for creating a machine-id to associate with network traffic. Sometimes, it is enough to have a plausible enough sounding reason to write down on paper, but you have to look at what something actually is. Any red blooded hacker knows there's what a tool is meant to be used for, and then there's what it can be used for. Less is more.
Nope, but Debian does use systemd by default so it's there.
I'm running Arch Linux and /etc/machine-id is present.
There's also an optional /etc/machine-info file that could exist. It's not a part of systemd and won't be created by default. It's more of an informal way to have details about the system in 1 spot. It was more popular when provisioning bare metal servers but still has value in the cloud. You can have key / value pairs on who to contact, where it's located, what type of machine it is, etc..
I would suggest staying away from Brave. I recently compiled the debloated Brave edition from source and was rather disappointed. Brave was slower on my machine than Firefox and Chromium according to Speedometer 3.1. The built-in adblocker does a worse job at cosmetic filtering than uBlock Origin on Firefox. On top of that, I had to build the browser from source because the only binaries I could find are Brave's own. Their builds aren't reproducible, and no Linux distro packages their own.
If you think I am being paranoid, you may also want to take a look at this:
I remember a long time ago intel tried introducing unique IDs for their processors. People got up in arms made a big stink and intel put its tail between its legs. Many years later, the industry through a thousand little cuts has that and more with merely a whimper because it’s not a single big boogey entity but it’s diluted across hundreds of thousands of developers who deployed a myriad ways to fingerprint their users…
Tangentially related to Device ID: Apple is significantly worse when it comes to machine identifiers; even with Autopilot enabled you can still install Linux on a Microsoft Surface device (or even Windows if you don't use a Microsoft Account). With MDM locks, Apple devices are literally bricks (especially since all ram and storage is soldered down and locked/paired to the secure enclave chip).
Aww you missed the Ballmer Years. Chalked full of "me too!"'s and broken promises. But he was right about one thing. Developers, developers, developers...
I was a big fan of Microsoft ten to fifteen years ago. I’ve since transitioned my whole family off Microsoft products now over to Linux, Apple, and proton. Edit: and Brave.
I really thought their corporate culture would’ve changed after the late 90’s but I guess this is a good lesson for founders. The culture you build into your company will likely outlast your tenure.