I don't see how it's possible any more, when correlated against all the various other data sources. And a record that might be unidentifiable now might become unique with more correlated data sources.

> de-identified

De-identified but far from useless.

as an example, they can remove the names off these sales data, so you can't identify who purchased what items. However, the purchaser would be identified by some sort of number, and you would be able to extract information about purchasing habits, and aggregate these habits into usable information for advertising purposes (like targeting and profiling).

And that's before AI training for LLM purposes.

Wello this is troubling. How much other data must they have bought that wasnt public