Nothing really new here, beyond a significant speedup to the process.
Custodians of anonymised medical data has recognised this problem for decades. Once you’ve given someone an anonymised data set, you rely on formal agreements to keep it anonymised, rather than the fiction that anonymised data can’t be linked back to individuals.
I did a demonstration many years ago that showed how to take “anonymised” datasets from three geographically related medical institutions and and link these together to produce individually identified data. This re-linkage was actually done live in a 90 minute presentation.
It shocked a lot of people.
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