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Does anonymity matter?

What if we were to create research methods where anonymity did not matter? Where clients could ask straight questions of customers on customer databases or customer websites, and get straight answers back from them? John Griffiths (www.planningaboveandbeyond.com) offers the view:
I am reminded of my induction into digital telephony over 20 years ago, where a technologist explained that by going digital, telephone companies had found a way to put voices and computer data into packets that they could send down a wire. Once they had made this jump, the challenge was to find ways to send data faster. Now thousands of people use the same wire at the same time to pass voice and data to each other in both directions in real time. While telephone stayed analogue we needed an operator to make a physical connection between two telephones, and while the two parties were using that single piece of wire no other information could be passed down that wire. That is where marketing research is stuck now. The analogue way to get trustworthy information from a participant is to set up a separate circuit isolated from everything else. Which makes it clunky, costly, slow and methodologically suspect. But what if client companies find that they can indeed get usable customer data without analogue circuitry? Supposing in a flurry of e-communications as a customer sends off for a new car brochure, they browse websites, watch ads on YouTube and Google Video and answer pop-up questionnaires before and after? Suppose car companies find ways for customers to browse information systems in the showroom to choose their cars and then integrate research capture. They could be gathering research data at the same time as selling. Unthinkable? Why ever not? This is called duplex information flow. All digital devices have had it for years, but marketing research hasn’t. Playing ‘peekaboo’ with identity is a poor way to protect an industry as established as marketing research. If the industry does not find a way around the anonymity issue, we may be like the rest of analogue technology and find ourselves consigned to history. The client can talk directly to customers and prospects and they willingly talk back, even initiating an exchange. So, what was your role again?