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?
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.
I would not be surprised if they used minecraft for it, which is why I had my initial concern/question.
Its probably got a larger install base than any non-corporate microsoft product outside of an OS. Which would make it a fantastic snooping tool