> (they'd at least need to dig through it more than just going by first/last name on the account itself).
FYI this is beyond trivial and automated to the nth degree. There is so much more to go off of than some form fields to uniquely identify a person.
For linking activity back to your person? Without name, payment details, photos of face, or IRL social graph the easiest path that comes to mind is IP address. But that's going to involve additional inquiries and is likely ambiguous (unless you live alone, but determining that is again more work).
“allow google to search for devices on your network?”
I’m not trying to be condescending here, but I’m just asking what someone thinks is happening here and what they can do with information scanned on your network.
I don't follow how that's relevant? In terms of the information yielded by an administrative subpoena of an account will that even appear? I'm not clear how the result of the scan is being used.
Suppose the data is retained in association with your pseudonymous account. So now in addition to my IP they have, what, the internal IPs and device names from my LAN? How does that lead directly to me without significant additional effort? I think their best option is still hitting up my ISP to get the billing info and service address of the account.
use it as a thought experiment i guess. your devices will advertise themselves to your local network and are easily fingerprintable to any device with network permissions and talk back a lot more than they should. The only point I’m trying to make is that you can’t fool this kind of with filling in form that’s wrong.