In the age of datalinkage, protecting microdata is as relevant as ever. Fortunately, there are R packages available to help:

• https://github.com/sdcTools/sdcMicro, also offering access via a Shiny interface
• https://github.com/J-PAL/PII-Scan is an R script scanning Stata (.dta),SPSS (.sav), CSV, and even SAS (.sas7bdat) datafiles and flags potentially personally identifiable information
• https://github.com/PovertyAction/PII_detection is a similar tool

That’s another excuse for not sharing data busted.