Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.
Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you’d also have to reboot to ensure it’s updated.


Maybe go back and read through the thread because I very clearly and repeatedly explained myself. I’m not going to do it once again for you here. You’ve basically made this huge assumption that machine-id was somehow critical to adopt for which I’m not aware of any supporting evidence, nor have you bothered providing any rationale for. You just keep stating it as fact. Meanwhile, as I’ve explained, systemd makes the whole situation worse precisely by creating a monolithic structure which everything depends on, and which makes solving the problem more difficult now. I don’t think there’s any point continuing the discussion though because we just keep restating the same points here and I don’t think any further understanding will be gained by anyone from continuing to do that.
My evidence was small but should have been easy to understand:
You can argue correlation vs cause but I’d argue this is not zero evidence.
You are on the other hand assuming that it would have been easy to avoid machine-id. Do you have evidence for this claim?
Why should I have to provide evidence while you provide none