Anonymous Schanonymous
Everybody loves a fad. You can pinpoint someone’s generation better than carbon dating by asking them what their favorite toys and gadgets were as a kid. Tamagotchi and pogs? You were born around 1988, weren’t you? Coleco Electronic Quarterback and Garanimals? Well well, an early X-er. A fad is cultural currency and social lubricant at the same time: even if you don’t have the thing itself, it’s a shared reference point that helps locate you as part of a particular time and place. Paradoxically, fads also help identify when a concept has gone stale, depending on who does it.
Fads happen in business, too. From corporate retreats to themed attire days (back in the olden times when we went to retreats, offices or, you know, anywhere) or the more recent mandatory fun on Zoom, enterprises are no less susceptible to fads, especially when they involve technology. Part of it is a desire to seem cutting edge, but a large part of it, we think, is simple misunderstanding. Without a good grasp of new systems and tools or the concepts that underlie them, it’s hard to tell the difference between a fad and a future.
Guess Who?!
Case in point: anonymization. Although the concept of masking identity or erasing identifiable features has long been a component of data science, it was not a widespread topic of discussion in industry in the US until the late 2000s and…
