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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318·

> Nothing in the collected data is "relating to an identified or identifiable natural person", so the checkbox is not even necessary.

The data collected could be used to identify a single person.

How many people have the exact same combination of CPU, amount of RAM, location, disk sizes,GPU vendor/model, disk layout and installed applications ?

If the data is unique enough, it's PII.

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> The data collected could be used to identify a single person.

> How many people have the exact same combination of CPU, amount of RAM, location, disk sizes,GPU vendor/model, disk layout and installed applications ?

> If the data is unique enough, it's PII.

You can not connect a unique combination of cpu, gpu, disk size, with me, y0ghur7_xxx, if you don't collect my ip address or my name in any other way, so no, it's not "personal data" as per GDPR.

And if a crash report for Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium/Brave is sent, that contains a memory dump including your username?

Seems like enough to make the connection, if someone got ahold of all the data.

The wrote in the mail that crash reports are anonymised.

They may well be, the issue is something called re-identification. Even with anonymised data, even when using differential privacy, re-identification can be possible if you're not very careful. The more data you have, the more likely re-identification is.

A unique random cookie is not PII automatically. It is only PII if it can be associated with something like a name (not limited to a name). Anonymous data with unique identities is not under the consent requirements of the GDPR.

It's interesting. On its own it won't let you identify anyone, even though it's unique. But if there is out there any database mapping computer configurations to identities then it does. There doesn't seem to be a reason to believe that such a database does not exist.

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