It's the email/username harvesting that you mean right? Or do people also have something against anonymised product analytics?
But I definitely only posted that original complaint of the email/username (not the person you responded to initially).
They're not anonymous, they're just pseudo-anonymous. It's incredibly easy to collect pieces of data A thru Z that, on their own, are anonymous but, all together, are not. It's also incredibly easy to collect data that you think is generic but is actually not.
Do you query the screen size? I have bad news for you. But, all of this is besides the point: when that data is exfiltrated to a third-party service, you have no idea how it's being used. You have a piece of paper, if you're lucky, telling you the privacy policy, which is usually "you have no privacy dumbass".
Even if data appears completely anonymous to humans, it can be ingested by machine learning algorithms that can spot patterns and de-anonymize the data.
I mean, we have companies who's entire business model is "how do we string together bits of data and tie it to real-world identity?": namely Google. Turns out it's remarkably easy when you have your hands in a lot of different pots. Collect a little anonymous data here, a little there, and boom: now you know that Billy Joe who lives on First Street loves to go to Walmart at 1 AM and buy Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a moment of weakness.
To be honest building things this way seems like such a competitive disadvantage I don't see how it could ever work at scale. Certainly all the big players are using them. If we shake our heads at the little players doing the same, we're just going to widen the moat
If that's true, there are many companies paying thousands -hundreds of thousands unnecessarily. Why are they choosing to throw away their money?
This is a fundamental property derived from information theory, but also confirmed time after time in practice: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/23/anonymise...
Data anonymization is a myth sold to politicians to whitewash data collection.
But in any sufficiently complex real-world database, it is a trivial step to map these pseudonymous tags to actual users, and thereby undo the obfuscation. It provides no actual privacy protection.
And the privacy IS the issue here.
I get that I am making a general statement from your original narrow scope so correct me if I'm wrong that you mean THIS bad thing is fine but other bad things are still bad.