Privacy

So it's a unique id "stamped" to your Windows install during setup when you sign into a Microsoft account during the OOB setup experience. It gets stored in the machine's registry, and is used for uniquely identifying your hardware and tying it to a Microsoft account for licensing purposes.

It does not persist between reinstalls, and it is in a known registry location so therefore viewable and editable now that we know it's there. We don't yet know the exact effects of editing it, or how exactly they correlated it in this case with the person's network activity.

I expect we'll have some mitigation plan in the next few months. Obviously starting with the recommendations in the article.

Completely pulling this from my ass:

• There should be some ways for researchers to watch what accesses that registry key and when.
• Hypothetically, one could just randomize their GDID.
  • Could target specific known ones to flood the data collected (everyone uses all zeros)
  • Forge evidence against specific targets (collect the GDID off a target's machine, then set a VM to that and go nuts)
  • or just randomly generate 1000 then activate Windows on all of them using MASgrave and rotate through them. Would probably need to randomly space out the activations, use generic hardware, and randomly shuffle the ones you used. Would also help to have multiple in use at once generating fake cover data to hide the real stuff in.

At this point it's probably easier to just go off grid than to try and make Windows "private".