Metrics and your privacy

[Alan]

> That's what doesn't make sense. If the UUID is unique to the install, then
> it doesn't tell you anything. If it is somehow unique to the hardware,

It tells you a lot at the statistical level if you have machines calling
in multiple times. If its a one off process never repeated on updates it
tells you no more than a simple "hello" message.

> then that mapping needs to be made transparent as that reveals other
> information (probably cpu and disk serial numbers and nic mac addresses)
> about the users hardware.

If you wanted to go that way a cryptographic hash is the usual approach.
Its trivial to turn the data into the hash, collisions are improbable but
its almost impossible to reverse the hash into anything.