Privacy

49644 readers

235 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Linux has /etc/machine-id and you forgot to setup your init daemon to periodically truncate and regenerate a new machine-id so you can be tracked via user telemetry analytics. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.

Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you'd also have to reboot to ensure it's updated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wat? If you have something running on your system that's tracking you, you are already fucked. It doesn't require that file. It can just create one anywhere on the system and use it, if need be.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

The problem with machine-id specifically is that it's become a standard way for the browser to identify itself. There obviously other ways you can be tracked, but this is a very low bar and a common way of sites tracking people.