And having read several rounds of "Device enrollment" phrases now, while the design document is non-public, I would hazard a guess that this is the essential components of enterprise device management.
Google hashes the ID before making use of it, so the actual ID remains disguised, but this absolutely would be necessary if they were trying to implement ChromeOS enterprise device management. (You need a unique identifier per enterprise machine, etc.)
Presumably they only care about this id file with respect to enterprise ChromeOS installations, since they make no effort at all to locate the file in any other location than the one.
It looks more like they simply don't care about reading the file in non-enterprise circumstances, since either the machine is enterprise-managed or it isn't, and as they only transmit hashes of the ID rather than the ID itself, they're in compliance with the FreeDesktop guidelines that require this file to be present:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=812641
Comment 26 implements Linux support for reading the machine's unique identifier:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/15dc90a...
That patch is Linux-only support in service of the greater patch:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/81a7040...
And having read several rounds of "Device enrollment" phrases now, while the design document is non-public, I would hazard a guess that this is the essential components of enterprise device management.
Google hashes the ID before making use of it, so the actual ID remains disguised, but this absolutely would be necessary if they were trying to implement ChromeOS enterprise device management. (You need a unique identifier per enterprise machine, etc.)
Presumably they only care about this id file with respect to enterprise ChromeOS installations, since they make no effort at all to locate the file in any other location than the one.
It looks more like they simply don't care about reading the file in non-enterprise circumstances, since either the machine is enterprise-managed or it isn't, and as they only transmit hashes of the ID rather than the ID itself, they're in compliance with the FreeDesktop guidelines that require this file to be present:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-id....