this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
533 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
87597 readers
5364 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh shit, I'm fucked!
No, wait, never mind, I use Linux 🤣
can microsoft still throw a GDID on a linux machine if you sign into a microsoft account while on linux? maybe not as powerful as on windows, but still as a unique identifying cookie or something?
If you run their software, yeah they can fingerprint your device. That includes if you visit their websites — it’s completely feasible to take a deterministic reading of various unique qualities of your machine that can be used to later identify your device as the same device in another circumstance. That doesn’t inherently provide lineage to anything identifying you, but it can easily lead to something.
Unless you have a very unique device, I imagine it’s not possible to do this posthoc with standard data collection from web traffic. You’d need to be intentionally doing this beforehand for it to be reliable.
Though… I wonder if there are certain softwares where telemetry can reasonable be used to fingerprint a device. Maybe a browser like Edge — though, who’s using Edge on Linux lol?
Telemetry is usually non-identifiable (by law if your country follows GDPR).
This form if ID is also pretty circumstantial. That might fly for advertisers but in a court of law I have my doubts.