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Not to defend Microsoft, but SIDs are non unique. I think theyre only guaranteed to be unique per AD forest with the addition of the RID subauthority. Lots of domains are domain.local or other such commonalities and so may have duplicates. Microsoft would know this, so the intent does not appear surveillance or data collection.



According to wikipedia, a SID looks like this

    S-1-5-21-3623811015-3361044348-30300820-1013
The 3 long numbers in the middle are called "Domain or local computer identifier". Further down it says that each of those numbers are encoded as a 32 bit integer. Assuming they're randomly generated, that's 96 bits of entropy, which is more than enough to uniquely identify every computer on the planet[1].

[1] There might be a few duplicates due to the birthday paradox.


> Microsoft would know this, so the intent does not appear surveillance or data collection.

Personally identifiable data collection. The goal is obviously data collection.




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