You can’t fully disable Microsoft’s GDID Windows 11 tracker, but these settings limit

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A 19-year-old walked through Helsinki airport in April 2026 carrying two 2TB hard drives and a ticket to Japan. He couldn’t make that flight. Finnish police stopped him on an Interpol Red Notice, and by July, US prosecutors had unsealed a federal complaint identifying him as Peter Stokes, an alleged member of the Scattered Spider hacking group, wanted over a May 2025 breach of a US luxury jewelry retailer that ended in an $8 million ransom demand.

No, we haven’t suddenly turned into a crime reporting publication, but it was Microsoft that handed the FBI a way to trace Stokes’ Windows PC across VPNs, proxy servers, and three countries. The tool is called a Global Device Identifier, or GDID, and outside a handful of enterprise documentation pages, most Windows users had never heard the term before this case made it public.

We went through the full 39-page complaint, cross checked it against independent reverse engineering of how Windows generates and transmits this identifier, and fact checked the technical claims since the story broke. Here is everything you need to know about GDID, how it caught Stokes, and what it means if you are one of the 1.6 billion people using Windows PCs.



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