[sdenton4]

Imagine you walk into a grocery store and pick up a rewards card to save N%. To get it, you have to give a phone number. If you write down your phone number, you've handed over some PII. If you write down a fake number, it's still legally PII, but has been anonymized, so the store won't be able to find you.

[martindevans]

The original comments was about detecting if a given IP is a bot or not - I assume they probably can't do that given 32 random bits!