Despite the increasing importance of personal data in a data-driven economy, there are also numerous efforts to make their processing data-protection-friendly and data-minimizing - not solely for compliance reasons. Nevertheless, the broad interpretation of "personal reference" as defined in Art. 4(1) GDPR means that many of the measures taken (e.g., k-anonymity) do not always achieve true anonymization of data (elimination of reference to a single entity). This paper shows why these measures can nevertheless (in view of Art. 11 GDPR) bring significant relief for data controllers in the area of big data analytics.