[AraceliHarker]

I think you can track pretty well with just the device ID alone, but you combine it with other identities like location information, IP address, cookies, login information and so on. Is that why Windows 11 recently made it impossible to bypass creating an MS account?

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah but they're speaking about switching to a chromebook or a mac. How is your device ID going to help with that?

[vladvasiliu]

If windows keeps phoning home, at some point they should see a bunch of device ids not checking in anymore.

[imajoredinecon]

You estimate how many people use computers and how many people use computers you make. When you subtract the two, you get how many people use computers that your competitors make.

Not every “internal metric” is something you can measure directly.

[alpaca128]

Most active Linux PCs were made by Windows PC manufacturers.

[marginalia_nu]

If that is how sketchy the data they are using to make decisions is, that would explain a lot about their decisions.

[lozenge]

They could summarise the User-Agent s visiting LinkedIn or a couple of other websites they run.