Companies increasingly hoover up larger and larger oceans of consumer data, promising that security and privacy aren‘t much of a worry because data is „anonymized.“ But as research has shown time and time again, anonymous data isn‘t all that anonymous — since it takes only a modicum of effort to either analyze the data — or cross reference it with other data — to ferret out personal identities. It doesn‘t really matter whether we‘re talking about NSA surveillance troves or social networking data: anonymous data just isn‘t anonymous.