> The only difference from before is [...]
Yes, I understand, but your explanation isn't reassuring to me. It's confirming that I actually do understand the mechanism and its ramifications.
Red Hat can do whatever it likes (although my take on it is that they're not likely to do this unique identifier thing). I'm not saying otherwise -- that's their right, after all.
All I am saying is that software that does this sort of thing is unacceptable to me and I will avoid it to the best of my ability. As is my right.
That's what's proposed? An identifier sent along with the request to see the current list of updates available?
> I don't see how this doesn't increase personally identifying features. On the contrary, it's adding one: a unique identifier.
An identifier that changes every week or so. At that point it is useless for identifying an individual, but can still be used statistically to determine how many systems are running what versions of Fedora, even behind NAT gateways. The only difference from before is now instead of "there's one IP with more than average check-ins, or check-ins from two or more different configurations", it's "there's one IP with X number of unique identifiers that randomize weekly seen over the last 28 days, so we can approximate X/4 different systems behind that IP".