Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716, which was posted by one of the authors. I hope that's ok!

I read long time ago opinion that anonymity and privacy are merely temporary side-products and rather short lived at that.

Piece argued that in medieval times and small cities people knew each other well and gossiped heavily (due to lack of other form of entertainment) and thus noone was truly anonymous. Privacy was taken away through prying eyes looking. According to it the only age of anonymity came before age of information which made it possible to crossreference various source of information which make it a blip on a human history timeline.

And today I'd say we're in the age of hyperinformation where enormous bodies of knowledge are compressed into (relatively) tiny LLMs which make crossreferencing even easier than before.