What fundamental trade-off does anonymization always involve?

The fundamental trade-off that anonymization always involves is between data utility and privacy protection. Anonymization techniques aim to remove or modify data in a way that it can no longer be linked to an individual, thus protecting their privacy. However, the more aggressively data is anonymized, the less useful it becomes for analysis and other purposes. For example, if you completely remove all demographic information from a dataset to ensure anonymity, you lose the ability to analyze trends based on age, gender, or location. Therefore, anonymization requires a careful balance between maximizing privacy and preserving enough data utility to achieve the desired analytical outcomes.