this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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Soooo, what does it stop Google or Meta from using same thing that Windows already offers to track users? Because as we all know, shit like this is NEVER only used by the good guys only.
The device id isn't ever sent to Google or Meta servers. It's created via login data on the windows machine and then sent to Microsoft with other telemetry info to be able to cross reference errors occurring with other telemetry.
At least my old company used to do something similar to track usage of internal tooling (and more importantly to alert us when users were seeing a bunch of unrecognized errors so we could alert and investigate quickly).
That being said why would Google or Meta care about Microsoft's unique identifier? They most definitely have their own they are using to track telemetry data you send them to understand usage patterns and problems.