[cyphar]

It's hard to do a 1-to-1 comparison but if the telemetry also used a masked form of the machine-id with an application ID unique for the telemetry service then you wouldn't be able to correlate them directly.

To be clear, I think this whole story stinks but the issue here is not that OS installations have unique identifiers (machines have lots of unique identifiers -- hardware MAC addresses, peripheral composition and device IDs, screen resolution) -- it's that Windows has an auto-enabled spyware^Wtelemetry system that shares enough data for them to be able to provide that kind of data to law enforcement. This would be a privacy nightmare even in the absence of a unique OS installation identifier. Heck, they could even take regular screenshots of your screen but that would be too obvious[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Recall