[ongytenes]

Protecting your anonymity isn't a sign that you're hiding something because you have done something wrong. It is because you're cautious. Even the most benign information can be use against you. European Jews in the early 1900s gave census takers the info yhat they were Jews. Decades later that info was collated with punch card machines by the Nazis to build family trees to hunt them down. This is an example of how "innocent" info can be weaponized in ways you would never dream of.

[delichon]

Unfortunately similar to US census data being used to intern Japanese during the war.

[int_19h]

This is also happening right now with ICE combing through the various federal databases that they previously didn't have access to.

But the worst thing is that the sheer amounts of compute available to even fairly small organizations, never mind governments, means that it's so easy to data mine stuff like that. And now there's AI to do the same with unstructured data. And meanwhile our corporate overlords are happy to profit from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46349281