Anyway. Yes, I do trust that of all parties, Google actually would both develop and deploy whatever that "double-blind encryption technology" is. Still, it's not the problem.
I think we need to stop dancing around the real issue with all that talk about PII. No, I really don't care about my PII just leaking somewhere. I care about what people do with them. It's what companies do with PII, "anonymized" or not, that's the problem. Advertising, upselling, price discrimination. Those are the real problems.
I _strongly_ doubt they have the corporate will or motivation to actually put it into production. I'd go so far as to say "getting it right" is antithetical to their (enormously profitable and deeply entrenched) business model.
meta data like where you made purchases when you made purchases and how much you spent and maybe a few other details are all you need 4 or 5 times to de-anonymize
full disclosure... I have 3 credit cards from this company....at this point I cannot imagine writing checks and carrying cash for daily use... I am not sure this battle can be won at this point.
100% deserves/needs scare quotes around that.
I mean just look at the snake-oil bullshit wording Google are using to describe what they do here:
"Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,”
I mean, I guess there are proper cryptographic means by which you could achieve something that matches that description.
But does _anyone_ trust the worlds biggest advertising company to be doing that???