Pseudonymous is not private. It means your name is missing until somebody supplies it once.
Paste any Solana address into an explorer and you get the entire history: every transfer, every counterparty, every token, every timestamp, from the first transaction to the most recent. No permission, no account, no cost. That is not a flaw — a public ledger is what makes the chain verifiable — but people consistently assume it is more anonymous than it is.
It takes one connection. A withdrawal from a KYC exchange ties an address to a verified identity in that exchange's database. Paying a merchant ties it to an invoice. Publishing a donation address ties it to you in public, permanently. Reusing one address across contexts ties those contexts together.
Then it spreads. Clustering heuristics group addresses that move funds together, and once one address in a cluster is named, the label propagates. Analytics firms do this at scale and sell the results; the work is unglamorous and extremely effective.
Pay a colleague and they can see your balance. Receive a salary on chain and everyone who has ever been paid by that wallet can compute it. Hold something worth taking and the fact is public along with a transaction history that shows when you are active.
A privacy pool severs exactly one connection: the one between the wallet that deposits and the wallet that withdraws. Both transactions stay public. What disappears is any on-chain way to say they belong to the same person. Everything else — where the money came from before, where it goes afterwards — remains as visible as it ever was, which is precisely why what you do after the withdrawal decides whether the mix was worth anything.