In information security and privacy, personally identifiable information or personally identifying information (PII) is any piece of information which can potentially be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person. Information security deals with several different trust aspects of information. ... Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to stop information about themselves from becoming known to people other than those they choose to give the information to. ...

Although the concept of PII is ancient, it has become much more important as information technology and the Internet have made it easier to collect PII, leading to a profitable market in collecting and reselling PII. PII can also be exploited by criminals to stalk or steal the identity of a person, or to plan a person's murder or robbery, among other crimes. As a response to these threats, many web site privacy policies specifically address the collection of PII, and lawmakers have enacted a series of legislation to limit the distribution and accessibility of PII. Category: ... The word stalk has several basic meanings. ... Identity theft (or identity fraud) is the deliberate assumption of another persons identity, usually to gain access to their finances or frame them for a crime. ... A privacy policy is a disclaimer placed on a website informing users about how the website deals with a users personal information. ...

Examples

Items which might be considered PII include, but are not limited to, a person's:

• Full name (if not common)
• National identification number
• Telephone number
• Street address
• E-mail address
• IP address (in some cases)
• Vehicle registration plate number
• Driver's license number
• Face, fingerprints, or handwriting

Information that is not generally considered personally identifiable, because many people share the same trait, include: Many countries use a national identification number as a means of tracking their citizens, permanent residents, and temporary residents for the purposes of work, taxation, government benefits, health care, and other governmentally-related functions. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard. ... It has been suggested that Vehicle licence be merged into this article or section. ...

• First or last name, if common
• Country, state, or city of residence
• Age, especially if non-specific
• Gender or race
• Name of the school they attend or workplace
• Grades, salary, or job position
• Criminal record

When a person wishes to remain anonymous, descriptions of them will often employ several of the above, such as "a 34-year-old black man who works at Target". Note that information can still be private, in the sense that a person may not wish for it to become publicly known, without being personally identifiable. Moreover, sometimes multiple pieces of information, none of which are PII, may uniquely identify a person when brought together; this is one reason that multiple pieces of evidence are usually presented at criminal trials. For example, there may be only one Inuit person named Steve in the town of Lincoln Park, Michigan. Inuit (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᓄᐃᑦ, singular Inuk or Inuq / ᐃᓄᒃ) is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic coasts of Siberia, Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Québec, Labrador and Greenland. ... Lincoln Park is a city located in Wayne County, Michigan. ...

Related laws

Recently lawmakers have paid a great deal of attention to protecting a person's PII. One of the primary focuses of the comprehensive medical privacy law, HIPAA, is to protect a patient's PII. The U.S. senate has recently proposed the Privacy Act of 2005, which attempts to strictly limit the display, purchase, or sale of PII without the person's consent. Similarly, the Anti-phishing Act of 2005 attempts to prevent the acquiring of PII through phishing. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. ... This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a bank, attempts to trick the banks members into giving away their account information by confirming it at the phishers linked website. ...

U.S. lawmakers have paid special attention to the social security number because it can be easily used to commit identity theft. The Social Security Number Protection Act of 2005 and Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2005 each seek to limit the distribution of an individual's social security number. This article needs cleanup. ... Identity theft (or identity fraud) is the deliberate assumption of another persons identity, usually to gain access to their finances or frame them for a crime. ...

On the other hand, many businesses see this increasing load of legislation as excessive, an unnecessary expense, and a barrier to progress. The increasing complexity of the laws might force companies to consult a lawyer just to engage in simple business practices such as server logging, user registration, and credit checks. Some have predicted such measures may inhibit the industry as a whole, lowering wages and creating a barrier to entry. For this reason, a number of privacy laws stress the "acceptable uses" of PII, such as Massachusett's Public Records Law and Fair Information Practices Act. Barriers to entry is a term used in economics and especially the theory of competition to refer to obstacles placed in the path of a firm who wants to enter a given market. ...

Forensics

In forensics, the tracking down of the identity of a criminal, personally identifiable information is critical in zeroing in on the subject. Criminals will go to great trouble to avoid leaving any PII; they wear masks (faces and hair are PII), gloves (fingerprints are PII), clothing that covers personal marks (tattoos and scars are PIII) and avoid writing anything in their own handwriting (handwriting can be PII). Forensic science (often shortened to forensics) is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal system. ... Forensic science (often shortened to forensics) is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal system. ...

Personal safety

In some professions, it is dangerous for a person's identity to become known, because this information might be exploited violently by their enemies; for example, their enemies might hunt them down or kidnap loved ones to force them to cooperate. For this reason, the United States Department of Defense has a strict policy controlling release of PII. [1] This is also the reason usually given in fiction for superheros and secret agents to disguise their faces and withhold their real names. The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ... Spider-Man, one of the best-known superheroes. ... Secret Agent is a 1936 British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. ...

See also

• Personal identity (philosophical concept)
• pseudonymity - Users sometimes compromise their pseudonymity by including personally identifiable information in messages, posts, or user pages.

In philosophy, the issue of personal identity concerns the conditions under which a person at one time is the same person at another time. ... In cryptography, pseudonymity is the ability to prove a consistent identity without revealing oneself, instead using a pseudonym. ...

External links

• A History of Privacy Issues: Personally Identifiable Information. Discusses the privacy issues of the P-Trak system.
• P3PWriter: Privacy Definitions: Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
• Outsourcing Privacy Laws