Right, there's probably no other phone in the world that typically stops for hours within 1000 feet of my bed and typically stops on Monday-Friday within 1000 feet of my work-desk.
If all you've got is full political power and control over propaganda networks, your won't get the USSR. You'll get Hungary between 2010 and 2026. It works well, but in the critical moments when things start going wrong you need to kill people to maintain power, or else your nascent autocracy collapses as quick as Orban's.
I'm no fun of Stalin, but this meme about 20+ million victims needs to be purged.
"The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000[ deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era." [0]
Would it be? I'd argue the current US administration is entirely propped up by television. Hell, the president seems to "rule" based on what Fox News said last night.
A slightly different and no more charitable perspective is that the people pulling the president's strings are the same people pulling Fox News's strings.
I think this begs the question of what anonymous data means. Sure my visit to HN is "anonymous" in that it doesn't say "abustamam visited this site" but piece together all the other visits that have my "anonymous ID" then eventually it paints a pretty nice picture of who I am.
My point is that even completely anonymous data that conforms to what you just said can easily become de-anonymized when contextualized to other "anonymous" data.
> A marketer's definition of anonymized is worthless. It's a fantasy they want everyone else to believe in.
I'm using your definition.
> Does it map to a single, identifiable person or something close enough that the distinction is meaningless?
Also
> If it can be "de-anonymized" then it was never anonymous to begin with.
Well sure, that's the point I was trying to make in my rhetorical question above. Individual pieces of data may be "anonymous" but put together with other anonymous data that can be traced to a single source and suddenly you can figure out quite easily who this person is. The data itself is still technically anonymous but it can be pieced together.