> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.

How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?

It would entirely be possible to limit the scope of things, by making sure the company that has your address (UPS or USPS, say) never has the other information. Each business would hand off a zero-knowledge identifier to you that you'd give to the others: Amazon would only know that the payment identifier they gave to you was fulfilled at VISA somehow, and then hand the package off to UPS with an identifier that they would never see again.

Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).

Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.