Comment by everdrive
1 day ago
That's good to know, thank you. I'm been considering moving away from systemd, and certainly don't use Chrome.
The number of things you need to try to keep track of merely _improve_ your privacy is maddening. The whole world seems to be against you.
D-Bus is much harder to get rid of than systemd.
It’s best to focus your efforts into rotating these IDs.
Not using Chrome is a better bet for privacy than not using systemd or D-Bus. If you sign into Chrome (which by default happens any time you sign into a Google product), your entire browsing history is logged on Google's servers, and tied to your email address, Android ID, and any other machine identifiers Chrome can read.
Anyone serious about privacy is using Firefox or Tor Browser, with various settings to harden it against tracking.
As a sysadmin and a former enemy of systemd it's actually pretty good overall, simplifies a lot of things.
If the privacy reasons are driving you, see if you can find fixes to these issues without getting rid of systemd.
Would OpenBSD solve both of these issues or is there a device ID in there that I’m not aware of.
I’ve seen that it uses a different init system and doesn’t rely on either dbus or systemd
OpenBSD’s equivalent is the hw.uuid sysctl: https://man.openbsd.org/sysctl.2#HW_UUID~2
Other BSDs don’t have that, but have equivalent PCI tree identifiers. “hostid”, too, is found on many systems but is much less unique as it’s often a function of local network address.
firejail has a setting to generate a random machine id at every run.
And you should be running the browser inside firejail at all times.