Privacy

50695 readers

607 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Linux has /etc/machine-id and you forgot to setup your init daemon to periodically truncate and regenerate a new machine-id so you can be tracked via user telemetry analytics. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

77 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.

Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you'd also have to reboot to ensure it's updated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The Impermanence module for NixOS recommends persisting /etc/machine-id. Is there any downside to not persisting it? (which is currently what I'm doing because I get errors when I do)

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

for most desktop users, not persisting /etc/machine-id is usually fine, but there are some specific scenarios where it can cause issues. Systemd uses machine-id to tag log entries. If it changes, you might lose the ability to correlate logs across boot sessions in journalctl. This is mostly an annoyance for debugging rather than a functional problem. A few NixOS modules like services.openssh or certain mail servers use machine-id for generating default host keys or identifiers. Changing it might cause warnings on first boot after a change, but usually nothing breaks since they fall back to other identifiers.