This ID is pretty much the only thing employers get to ID the workers, and thus track the quality of their work. (Which is particularly important on Turk, as anonymity seems to encourage fraud.) Everything else is push: web service calls to contact a worker, or comment on an assignment. That stuff is all intermediated by turk, meaning it’s all anonymized fairly effectively - and quite constrained as to content and format.<p>These days Turk goes so far as to handle your 1099s for you - so you don’t know the names of even the workers that have done more than $600 worth of work for you…<p>Of course most employers in it for the long haul build up reputation databases built on these ids, and many encourage their workers to fill out profiles, direct on the employers website, allowing for more direct contact, and less constrained messaging.<p>Which is why this is a big deal for the employers: names, pictures, locations, and review helpfulness, can all be shoved into the reputation algorithm or used by survey companies for demographics. So it will be harvested.<p>And that makes turk a lot less anonymous. Which seems like a breech of trust to the workers, because although they aren’t guaranteed anonymity in the TOS, that has been the bargain so far.