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Comment by xeyownt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> motivated adversaries.

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.

> Unless anonymization is provided by your browser, there is nothing you can do to prevent such identification technology

The OS could treat certain apps as untrusted and spoof or limit the access to these unique identifiers.

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.

No security is perfect; there is always a way to bypass it. But security can be highly valuable.

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