Comparing PI and PII Data: Whats the Difference?

The financial giant received this fine for hiring a moving and storage company that failed to conduct adequate data destruction and decommissioning devices before selling servers and hard drives containing PII to unauthorized third parties. Another problem surrounding the management of PII is that regulators are constantly developing new expectations for how organizations should manage and process it. Learn the critical role of AI & ML in cybersecurity and industry specific case studies.

Blog Keep up with the latest news and happenings in the ever‑evolving cybersecurity landscape. New Perimeters Magazine Get the latest cybersecurity insights in your hands – featuring valuable knowledge from our own industry experts. Personally Identifiable Information; Any representation of information that permits the identity of an individual to whom the information applies to be reasonably inferred by either direct or indirect means. Spoofing is a scam in which criminals try to obtain personal information by pretending to be a legitimate business or another known, trusted source. The app was designed to take the information from those who volunteered to give access to their data for the quiz.

Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site. If a data subject feels a violation has occurred they can contact either the DPO or DPA, which was selected by the involved company and communicated to the subject. This can be awkward in practice, as a controller’s or processor’s DPO or DPA may not be in the same country or speak the same language, as the subject. Only 49%, however, said transparency around the collection and use of their PII was now more important to them.

The Federal Act on Data Protection of 19 June has set up a protection of privacy by prohibiting virtually any processing of personal data which is not expressly authorized by the data subjects. The protection is subject to the authority of the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner. A Data Privacy Framework is a documented conceptual structure that can help businesses protect sensitive data like payments, personal information, and intellectual property. The framework specifies how to define sensitive data, how to analyze risks affecting the data, and how to implement controls to secure it.

Account number, credit card number or debit card number, in combination with any required security code, access code or password that would permit access to the person’s financial account. Strong penalties have been outlined with fines as large as 4% of the organisation’s global yearly revenue or 20 million Euro, whichever sum is the greatest. The biggest data breaches and the shocking fines sheds light on what the potential harm a data breach would have on a business by not adhering to GDPR. The implications on the whole business must be communicated from the management down, especially with the way in which companies handle marketing and sales data.

Without testing whether data can be reverse-engineered, an organization has no guarantee that PII can’t be recompiled to identify the end user. Peter Hoff, vice president, security and risk at IT consulting company Wursta, suggests there is an ongoing crackdown on the mismanagement of PII across the U.S. In August of this year, the FTC announced it was suing Kochava for allegedly selling the personal GPS data of customers who’ve visited reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters and addiction recovery facilities. This raises significant data collection challenges for organizations that need to collect data to generate insights and optimize customers’ experience, without leaving PII exposed to mismanagement or unauthorized third parties.

In light of the public perception that organizations are responsible for PII, it is a widely accepted best practice to secure PII. While managing PII in a way that’s compliant with international and domestic data protection regulations can be challenging, enterprises can mitigate the risks by periodically testing whether their users’ personal data can be re-identified. Important confusion arises around whether PII means information which is identifiable or identifying . In prescriptive data privacy regimes such as HIPAA, PII items have been specifically defined. In broader data protection regimes such as the GDPR, personal data is defined in a non-prescriptive principles-based way. Information that might not count as PII under HIPAA can be personal data for the purposes of GDPR.

PII consists of any information about a person — including data that can trace or distinguish their identity — and any information that can be linked to them . But personal data on its own doesn’t always consist of all those identifiers. However, if Jane Smith has a street address and phone number attached to her name in a single location or file, most jurisdictions would call that personal data. As such, companies in possession of Jane’s data are beholden to data privacy regulations. During the second half of the 20th century, the digital revolution introduced “privacy economics”, or the trade of personal data. Disclosing data can reverse information asymmetry, though the costs of doing so can be unclear.

This is despite the fact that 72% said they believed their personal information was for sale online. If any of the the above laws apply to you and you are collecting Personally Identifiable Information, then you need to have a compliant Privacy Policy. Make sure to use Termageddon’s Privacy Policy generator to create your Privacy Policy and protect yourself from privacy-related fines and lawsuits. Organisations must maintain detailed reports of when consent to store data was given, the security precautions in place and they must notify the individuals if their data is being used and the manner in which it is being processed.