Should data be anonymized irrespective of the domain? I am using a dataset from Marketing and sales department. The dataset contains customer name (company name), company address, pincode, no of orders placed, revenue generated from that customer etc.
My question is whether I should hide/mask/anonymize customer name and address etc?
Of course, the insights that we generate will be used by the business users from sales and marketing team.
So, should we use a duplicate identifier (mapping sheet) to indicate the customer names and address etc.
For ex: Company A is indicated as 101, Company B is indicated as 321 etc. Some random identifiers and that mapping file will be maintained by the business users (from sales and marketing department).  Or is it not necessary to anonymize the data?
Can share me your suggestions on when to and when not to anonymize the data?
I know in healthcare, we have individual level data (patient centric data) and they are very sensitive, so we mask them using identifiers. But does the same apply in sales and marketing domain as well? Are the company name, address, revenue generated etc should be treated as confidential?

It doesn't really hurt to do it, since business insights are mostly reported on a higher, aggregated level than individual level. But it does take some effort to create and maintain the mapping.
I have worked for companies that masked the identity of campanies, as well as ones that didn't. In general, it really doesn't do much. The large firm that does care about confidentiality is easily exposed from their covariates (seeing volumes of order and zip code, you know that's Apple/Amazon/etc). The ones who can't be traced back don't care about their order volumes leaking out as much.
Usually there is contract involved in B2B orders, which states that data and records can be used internally for business purposes. If your marketing and sales teams are not outsourced and are considered internal, you can probably do whatever. Just write to your boss in email to get his written approval, so you can share the responsibility with him/her.
