Metrics and your privacy

[Tim]

On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 09:51 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> Certainly that is your choice, but many people wouldn't have an issue
> with hashed serial numbers as the kinds of problems caused by
> providing them either would be very minor or very low probability. 

I don't know.  I see lots of complaints in this thread, and I've seen
lots of complaints about those sort of ID systems, in general.

While it's true that "most" probably won't care, simply because they've
no idea what's going on, those that are concerned will be a *lot* of
people who don't like it.  And once you put some unique ID on a machine,
for one purpose, there'll be other programmers who think they've got a
need for a unique ID, too, and they'll use it as well.  It doesn't take
much usage of a unique ID for it to become a useful way of IDing a
person across a number of things.

Numbering people has never been a popular thing.

-- 
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