Slashdot: The File /var/lib/dbus/machine-id Matters For Your Privacy (and Devuan Fixed It)

The File /var/lib/dbus/machine-id Matters For Your Privacy (and Devuan Fixed It)
Published on December 01, 2019 at 12:04AM
Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil (Denis "Jaromil" Roio) writes: A few days ago Devuan ASCII 2.1 was announced and one update has been overlooked by most media outlets: our dbus patch to re-generate machine-id at every boot. This patch matters for everyone's privacy and I hope more distributions will follow our example, let alone Debian. We are dealing with important privacy implications: non-consensual user tracking is illegal in many countries and is not even mentioned in the machine-id documentation so far. "In theory, the machine-id should be a persistent identifier of the current host," explains the README documentation. "In practice, this causes some privacy concerns..."

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