[shalmanese]

I don't think antagonistic data obfuscation is the primary problem to be solved since, as you noted, it's extremely hard and not valid in most circumstances. Antagonism should be filtered out at the client selection stage, most clients have no incentive to pierce the veil and it's relatively easy to vet and make sure that a client has no benefit in deanonymization.

What obfuscation mainly does is remove the PII that neither side wants to handle before the data gets transferred over so the data is "safe" and the receiver of the data no longer has the burden of stewardship over PII.

Contrary to a lot of handwringing on the internet, almost everyone that handles your data couldn't care less about you as a person. Their overwhelming interest in you is as a bag of attributes that they can statistically correlate with other bags of attributes. It's a relief for them if they can scrub all the PII from their databases while retaining all of the other bag of attribute qualities that they care about. Of course, the few entities that do care about deanonymization are the ones that make this entire process so difficult.

[crabbone]

> couldn't care less about you as a person

Precisely. They care about my credit card number and enough of identifying details to impersonate me to the credit company...