[alkonaut]

Yup for only identifying a system that’s easier. If this is all the telemetry is ever planned to do then that’s all you need. The benefit of having a local hash function is when you want to transmit multiple ids for data. E.g in a word processor you might transmit hash(salt+username) on start and hash(salt+filename) when opening a document and so on. That way you can send identifiers for things that are sensitive or private like file names in a standardized way and you don’t need to keep track of N generated guids for N use cases.

On the telemetry server you get e.g

Function “print” used by user 123 document 345. Using that you can do things like answering how many times an average document is printed or how many times per year an average user uses the print function.