Thanks for the comment and hear you on the anonymization. What we see is that customers will go through and categorize what is PII and what is not and anonymize as needed. If not, they'll back fill with synthetic data. You can change the gender from male to something else, same with the city, etc.

It's really down to the use-case. If you're strictly doing development, then you'll probably want to use more synthetic data than anonymization. If you care about preserving the statistical characteristics of the data then you can use ML models like CTGAN to create net new data.

Definitely a balance between when do you anonymize vs. when do you create synthetic data.