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Almost literally every company with human customers collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business. Very few of those have a business model where t

Almost literally every company with human customers collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business. Very few of those have a business model where the purpose is to profit from the sale of that data. Every one of our customers is treating first party data for first party use cases, which is far more common than buying or selling data. How many companies have prod user data and developers that need an up to date prod-like database? A ton. Many just copy prod and distribute to devs. The good ones try to keep scripts for populating the database with test data up to date, but that’s a nightmare. Anonymization is an elegant solution to this problem. There are countless other use cases where organizations need to use their customer data internally and (should) want to protect identities. Most companies don’t want to sell their user data because they consider it competitive, and most data brokers don’t want to anonymize because why would they if they’re already selling raw data? They aren’t interested in our software because we prevent singling out of identities.

newaccount74 3y ago
> collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data. It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on. Yet these small businesses have no idea what data they are collecting. The owners are completely clueless. They have all this data collection shit on their website because someone else who has no clue put it there. They see facebook and google collecting all this data, and think they need to collect data too. But they have no idea what to do with it. At best they look at a few numbers and get a feeling that all the money they spent on their website was worth it. But it's all bullshit. 90% of businesses don't need invasive tracking, don't know what to do with the collected data, and could save money if they didn't bother to track all that useless data.
- willseth 3y ago
  If you have a name, address, and phone number associated with a customer account, then you have collected PII. Good luck avoiding that. User tracking actually requires linking to associate online activities with user personas. Anonymization systems are designed to break linking.

newaccount74 3y ago

> collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data. It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on. Yet these small businesses have no idea what data they are collecting. The owners are completely clueless. They have all this data collection shit on their website because someone else who has no clue put it there. They see facebook and google collecting all this data, and think they need to collect data too. But they have no idea what to do with it. At best they look at a few numbers and get a feeling that all the money they spent on their website was worth it. But it's all bullshit. 90% of businesses don't need invasive tracking, don't know what to do with the collected data, and could save money if they didn't bother to track all that useless data.

willseth 3y ago
If you have a name, address, and phone number associated with a customer account, then you have collected PII. Good luck avoiding that. User tracking actually requires linking to associate online activities with user personas. Anonymization systems are designed to break linking.