> The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
> [...] I was at a fulfillment center in California from [redacted] to [redacted].
> I was an [redacted], inside a new facility that had about 1,000 associates.
Isn't this a lot of info given away?
/edit: in case the original article does the same
If it is just a coincidence that the details of your fudging match a specific person, then they can still deny it. I don't know, but the point of all this is to protect a source, not to protect a random person who might be implicated by bad luck and punished illegally by bad actors.
I don't find that the military information was valuable, it could've easily been left out, and the veteran question the author posed could have still been asked if it were rephrased.
There are trade offs in all of these methods, but I don't see them as being particularly wrong if you want to provide color to your story without materially affecting it, and can be confident that you aren't helping to identify your source.