Privacy advocates worry, for instance, that ENUM, a project to link the domain-name system with telephone numbers, will make all individual users identifiable.
For small transactions, that leaves anonymity largely intact, although there remains a risk that a particular pattern of transactions may render users identifiable; and if someone posts their address publicly, they are no longer anonymous.
The FT report also suggests that Apple try to differentiate itself from other efforts in the field, such as Google's purchase of the Nest thermostat and smoke detector company for $3.2bn, by promising not to collect user-identifiable data or offer advertising on devices.
Under pressure to comply with Chinese law, Yahoo! released Tao's private user-identifiable data, which led to him being imprisoned for eight years by Chinese authorities.
That said, Bribespot is going to "great lengths" not to collect any directly identifiable information about users of its app; user identifiers saved in its database, he said, are "random generated strings which -- even if somebody gets a hold of them -- will not tell you much about whose phone it was".
And then in 2016, security researchers with NYU, led by computer scientist and professor Keith Ross, found other ways to hack users' personally identifiable information out of Yik Yak.
I've said that until I'm blue in the face, and then I read statements by the groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology that say we track users with identifiable information, and it's patently false.
The data these questions generate is highly personalized, but only shared with Poshly's brand customers after being anonymized – meaning users' personally identifiable information is removed, like their name, email or address.
