and everyone knows that it won't, and that the violations will be open, obvious, and ubiquitous.
Actually it probably is. Because anonymization gives the demographics info. Which is what big data cares about. Google doesn’t give a crap what illness YOU have. What they want to know is what a person of your race, gender, age, income bracket, and zip code has. So they can compare that to all the other folks in those demos, and get statistics to tell them group X is more likely to have illness Y.