Re: What exactly is hostid used for?

From: Doug McIntyre <merlyn_at_geeks.org>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2022 21:26:51 UTC
On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 01:51:39AM -0500, grarpamp wrote:
> > But frankly, why would you ever bother with disabling it?
> 
> Because "apps (often aka anti-privacy tools)" and nic's and attacks
> can read your unique and paste it into the internet, and do whatever
> else with it. Would not be surprising if javascript browsers are reading
> such things. Nor would some environments want it embedded in say
> offsite backups of zpools, etc.

I think the last time I had bought any commercial software for
FreeBSD, it was OSS drivers about 20 years ago. Not sure there's been any since.

I doubt the browser vendors make a path for hostid to show through,
when there are a million other things that browser fingerprinting can
capture and use.

Ie. are you unique enough? https://www.amiunique.org/

There's so much other data to be used that is pushed through the browser
allowing fingerprinting.