The author shares a story from their time at Amazon about how they had to obfuscate customer IDs due to an analyst's attempt to uncover sales and growth data. The author notes that many companies, often startups, still expose primary key values in URLs, which can be revealing of operational information. The author believes that such information should remain private to the company and not leaked out to customers or competitors. Twilio is mentioned as a company that uses MD5 hashes of random strings to generate distributed primary keys, providing consistent length and collision-free data without leaking company information.