Quite probably. nmap does (or certainly used to) have options to report the OS of a given machine had based on various quirks of the packets it got back from them. It was disturbingly accurate at times. You put that together with banner messages from running services, MAC addresses, responses to broadcast packets, deliberate probing, and the number of devices you _can't_ remotely identify on a network without actually logging into them is probably very small.

It's a lot easier to create an embedding with equivalent information than to reliably identify a particular device, and that embedding is more than sufficient to enable targeting.

If you are living in a flat, this could of course be your neighbour's washing machine/TV etc...

If the washing machine is on the network, its manufacturer is already aware about its age.

I love that a poor, stupid man like me is being targeted by teams of the smartest data analytics professionals on the planet.

Makes me think of DraftKings. You take your average 20 something sports fan - drinking beer, watching the game. And, on the other end of that smartphone display exist some of the most complex algorithms ever designed by teams of mathematics / statistics PhDs and it's deliberately built around targeting... this one guy from Florida who is pretty sure his team will be up by 7 at halftime.

Maybe it's more of a morbid joke, but it makes me laugh to think about.