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/etc/machine-id also exists

Indeed. One can regenerate it on each shutdown / reboot. The process is a little different depending on whether one has systemd or not. It's a dbus thing but systemd ingests it and there is a specific process around updating that in systemd.

There is also the NetworkID in Firefox about:networking#networkid

Another trackable piece of information on most systems is the creation time of / which just about any application can query unless it is properly isolated. This can be turned into a short unique hash. There are hacky ways to change the Birth time on unmounted filesystems using debugfs which may result in corruption.

    stat / | grep irth
    Birth: 2023-04-17 20:27:01.000000000 +0000

    stat / | grep irth | md5sum
    8b5e849954373f8f3c2a625847e4e858

by jolmg1 hours ago|

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But you don't have a service uploading it along with the URLs you visit, which is the creepy part. The ID itself can be useful for your own administration. And if such a service were to appear, it could easily be removed. Everything in Linux is optional, especially as long as you stick to open source.

by ranger_danger1 hours ago|

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How do we know? Does anyone check for things like this?

Many, many apps read /etc/machine-id if you do a quick github search.

Apps may have been silently correlating our activity for years without us knowing.

We know DHCP, EFI, GNOME, popularity-contest and many other apps already use it. There are countless ways it could be used already that are hard to detect.

by jolmg15 minutes ago|

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Basically all source is open. Eyes are plenty. Somebody would raise a stink. People can also notice things while monitoring their network via a number of tools like Wireshark, etc. All it takes is one person to notice and share their findings.

It also helps that "Linux" isn't a monolith. One person's installation can be very different from another in terms of the software used. If one piece of software collects, that collection isn't as valuable as Microsoft's because the userbase is much smaller.

by cyphar57 minutes ago|

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It should be noted that the "correct" usage of /etc/machine-id is that you use it in a way that doesn't allow cross-correlation between different applications by using a HMAC of the machine-id with an application-specific UUID instead of using it directly. systemd-id128 has a command line flag to do this for you.

Whether everyone does that correctly, that's a different question. On the other hand, while developers should be more careful about how they use identifiers like this, if an application on your machine wants to track you they don't need /etc/machine-id.

by ranger_danger36 minutes ago|

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Yes I think privacy and security on the desktop has fallen way behind mobile and we need much stronger protection these days.

by jolmg25 minutes ago|

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Mobile's came at the cost of composability between programs and the imposition of policy, which are against the Unix Philosophy. I wouldn't make that trade. Mobile's a sad state of affairs, inferior to desktop in many ways.

You can most likely get better security than mobile's, you just need to e.g. learn to write your own SELinux policies, etc.

by sudonem2 hours ago|

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And it’s easily altered.

by ranger_danger1 hours ago|

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It can still be correlated with past IDs by countless other methods in order to keep tracking you further.

by kvuj23 minutes ago|

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But then you're using other methods, you're not using the ID as tracker. In fact if you just remove it, it eliminates this entire discussion.