It was big news amongst lots of people a few years back. These things get a lot of attention amongst privacy advocates and techies and but don’t get through to the mainstream who can’t tell the difference between reasoned fears and the opinions of loony influencers/conspiracy theorists. They are too busy sharing dick picks and publishing their life history on Meta. If only we had a responsible and ethical media who would help inform the public instead of pushing sponsor messages and mining clicks.

I believe the aim is to link data from various sources to enable more complex analysis. As such anonymized ids are likely reversible in many cases. Unfortunately voters didn’t really get an opportunity to debate and have a say on the matter and we are probably stuck with it now.