Link: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disable-microsofts-gdid-windows-11-tracker-but-these-settings-limit-what-it-captures/

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Damn, perhaps competent prosecutors & FBI agents wouldn't have allowed this information to leak.

Losing an incredible privacy leak to own a 19 year old who posted his crimes on snapchat.

I wonder how many other GDID type identifiers are out there, besides this Microsoft one.

I'd bet every proprietary OS (or open source base OS with deeply integrated proprietary software, such as anything Google makes) has something similar.

For things like phones, an IMEI is already a permenantly attached unique ID tied to the modem. There is also a hardcoded serial number in most electronic devices.

With hardware fingerprinting it doesn't really matter that much

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Processor_Serial_Number

27 years ago...

Most CPUs don't allow you to read the serial number anymore (from userspace at least, I'm sure there are ways of extracting it).

Except Raspberry Pi for some reason, and for some other reason my coworker decided to use that as a device identifier for one of our services (devices we build and control, we're not just tracking random people). So now I guess we're stuck with raspberry pis for the near future. On any other device it just returns "ERR00000“.

Repost

Ok and?

Exactly. Not everyone sees everything the first time it's posted.