Cannot find much information about this on the internet, but I reinstalled Windows 11 today and Microsoft Store had a list of all apps I had previously installed on this computer. It’s honestly really creepy. I don’t even have a Microsoft account. How did they do this? The only things in common with my previous and current install are the hardware and the activation key. Are they really using hardware fingerprinting or your Windows serial key to track you?
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Probably, yeah. They already have this functionality built in to the Windows store in order to provide hardware-linked apps, why wouldn’t they use it for this too?
(For example certain hardware can come with a license for HEVC codecs on the M$ Store)
Windows just isn’t a suitable operating system if you care about privacy. You could maybe make the argument back in the Windows 7 days but that ship has long sailed.
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Wow, this is awful. Thanks for confirming.
Hold on, I just reinstalled Windows, but this time I didn’t enter my activation key. My Store install history isn’t there. Are you sure they do it based on Hardware ID? I’m going to activate my Windows here in a moment and we’ll see if it comes back.
Thats so much true @jonah
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So, I activated Windows 11 with the same license key, on the same hardware, and now the Store history doesn’t appear to be there anymore. What in the world happened? I flashed the BIOS between installs. I wonder if Windows keeps something there.
Installations are tracked for each local account suggesting that Microsoft uses additional data and not only the hardware ID to keep records.
I’m not sure how they do it. The Windows Store is a black box.
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Everything you install in MS black box is linked to a hardware ID calculated based on your hardware components. Say you swap a RAM or SSD with HDD. Then it changes, voila your store data resets.
I may be wrong, but I suspect this may be due to some (hidden) relation of sorts that gets hardcoded deep inside H/W in factory/during preinstallation phase.
I may be wrong though…
Windows 10: Gratis-Apps im Store jetzt ohne Microsoft-Konto | heise online (Article in German)
Seems like it’s been a thing for a while, and the speculation is that OS calls home to retrieve the information. Your windows serial key can be a reasonable option to track this.
Windows is just a horrible, spooky OS. I would rather get a MacBook than daily drive Windows.
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I switch to Windows to game, which is like once every few weeks at best, mostly because I am dreading to create a VM with Windows in it on my PC. I have an almost 10 years old MacBook for personal use and it’s still going okay.
KVM + QEMU = near native performance.
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I’ll give it a try during weekend.