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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

So enough software information to know everything you do, and enough hardware information to fingerprint you.

How in the hell can this just be called analytics?

This level of data isn't anonymous. It can't be.

If another piece of software did this, Microsoft would label it spyware and Windows Defender would kill it.

Yet, they feel fine doing this with an OS that they actually sell. It's not even crap freeware. You pay to have your every move watched.

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Between browsing, searching, Android phone telemetry, and GMail, Google already has better than that level of data on pretty much everyone already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Pointing out that Google/Android sucks just as hard doesn't excuse Microsoft.

aka, what dandelion_lover said.

> This level of data isn't anonymous. It can't be.

is there some big list of the hardware I have bought? If not, sure, they can fingerprint me but I don't see how it de-anonymizes me.

De-anonymization is incredibly easy (bordering on trivial) with any rich data set. For example, 87% of the US population is uniquely identifiable by their combination of DoB, zip code, and sex [1]. The richer a dataset is, the easier it is to de-anonymize. This is a pretty rich dataset.

[1] http://latanyasweeney.org/work/identifiability.html

If you get enough info... and compare it to someone else's set of info... there is going to be an intersecting set of information.

Combine that with unique combinations... and you get an increasing confidence of who the end user is.

It's why they suggest you don't "full screen" browsers when using tor... Stuff like browser sizes can identify you:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/102133/how-can-...

It's easy to tell that if a custom screen size can identify you... what will other unique traits do?

I'm not sure that they do this, but all it would take is for it to be tied to the license key you bought from microsoft.

Which is conveniently taken care of when you sign in using your Microsoft account.

Give up your name in any transaction and bye bye your anonymity.

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