This is how it works in press releases. The problem is that data protection laws were in fact lobbied by corporations either openly or behind the scenes, and focus on things like real names and passport numbers that look impressive but aren't really important for the data market. These are just put into some high security database (e.g. for billing info), and it's fine. However, the real behavioral data that costs money is shared as easy as it ever was in the form of “User ID <long number> was at the location of Wi-Fi AP ID <another long number>”. It doesn't matter that the data owner still trades all the history of activity of a certain individual, or that Wi-Fi station locations can be matched with some external database. Everything is fine as long as you don't slap someone's real name on that. And, contrary to the show social networks make, they couldn't care less about real names. Even if you trick the system by calling yourself John Doe, you still look at the specific content, and have specific contacts, you are you, and the data is the same.
I remember that about a decade ago some IT guys have paid for the common Facebook advertiser access, then targeted the ad campaigns using filters in such a way that their intersection only resulted in a single user, or just a couple of them, and were able to match those “anonymized” accounts to real ones. You didn't have to be a genius to do that. Facebook certainly knew it could be used like that. Everyone who made money on that simply agreed to use “anonymization” as a smokescreen. Later, with all the scandals, those routine operations were presented as something exceptional done by a small number of bad actors.
