Pseudo-anonymizing is worthless snake oil, and provides little in the way of actual privacy. This tool is just an escalation in the level of contempt being routinely shown against actual people.
Pseudo-anonymizing is worthless snake oil, and provides little in the way of actual privacy. This tool is just an escalation in the level of contempt being routinely shown against actual people.
Can you explain more on why "Pseudo-anonymizing is worthless snake oil, and provides little in the way of actual privacy"?
I'm sure when one uses Tor browser (an example of what I mean under pseudo-anonymizing), they are as safe from tracking as possible. They will get tracking cookies and all that, but from a random location, and all IDs the web app could have created will be destroyed right after closing the browser tab.
Well, for starters, I don't consider the Tor browser to be anonymizing. It only offers protection against outside attackers, it offers almost no protection against the websites you may browse to (how could it?)
Pseudo-anonymization is snake oil because it's not that hard to reverse. All you have to do is combine the "anonymized" data with data from other sources and you can identify people. It doesn't even take that much data from other sources.
True anonymization is possible: it requires the collector to just keep general aggregate statistics and to immediately delete the individual telemetry reports. But few entities do that, and we have to just trust that the ones the claim they do are being honest and competent about it. But the track record is extremely poor so trusting in such claims is, in my opinion, very foolish.