“For data brokers dealing in our personal information, our data can either be useful for their profit-making or truly anonymous, but not both.”
ZIP code, birthday and gender alone uniquely identify 87% of Americans in one landmark study. A 2013 study picked out 50% of people from two random time and location points. HIPAA’s Safe Harbor trims ZIP codes to three digits and calls that scrubbed. “Anonymized” is a marketing word for data that hasn’t been matched to you yet.