The point is that it’s a loophole in privacy laws so they don’t have to outright tell people that they collect personal or identifying information. So they can legally mislead people by claiming it’s anonymous telemetry in hopes that users don’t actually look into it or understand the implications.

Ad firm money.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but my first instinct when I see stuff like this is they have a secret contract with an advertiser and are selling this information.

Like if you’re going to use Arch btw, go all the way and use actual Arch.

Those are absolutely ways of covertly identifying your device while technically not counting as “personal information” under privacy laws.

It’s not fucking over Microsoft, it’s prevent Microsoft from fucking us over. Microsoft is not the victim in this.