You were always a tech companies product

Why do they need to keep anything deanonymised? You need to verify 18+ and I appreciate that requires a ledger for legal purposes but that verification can and should be data siloed. Also, the way databases work with keys mean that I’d be pretty surprised if there weren’t joins being possible that were used (ie where do people that view this content live), but with access (without having specific bugs alongside and audit trail) forcing anonymous data on employees