Summary: The above is important because of the timing. After 5+ years of pension fraud at Sirius 'Open Source' the company enrolled staff without paperwork/signatures and barely with any consent (in late 2016); to make matters worse, a few years ago it upped staff contribution levels without increasing its own, in effect forcing staff to send even more money (one's own money, not the company's) into this dubious pot with uncertain future.
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it