Comment by cyanydeez
7 days ago
while it'd be nice for your paranoia to believe this id key is used for surveillance, it's more likely they just use the same type of finger printing that browsers use.
There's zero way to onion.route your internet connection information, unless you plan to go nowhere and do nothing.
Sure, it's worth to highlight privacy-potential-invasions, but the idea that you'll some how escape notice by changing the gdid is short sighted navel gazing.
There is literally court documents showing this was used by surveilling in at least one case. How that is paranoia
Could you share more context and details?
You might've missed this recent story where the FBI was able to identify an alleged teenage member of the Scattered Spider hacking group using the Microsoft GDID, and made an arrest:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920338
1 reply →
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disa...
https://www.ghacks.net/2026/07/12/microsoft-confirms-windows...
yes, atleast one anecdote that someone found it useful; as opposed to all the evidence that your browser can be fingerprinted consistently; your windows machine makes like 500 calls to outside services.
You think they would have been thwarted without the gdid