PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information -- that information which can uniquely identify an individual.
PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information -- that information which can uniquely identify an individual.
Some examples of PII include phone number, home address or (in the USA) social security number.
Some locations will have laws requiring information systems implementers to protect PII for users of their systems. Protecting PII (especially on the internet) has become more and more important as interests looking to discover PII have prevalent.
However, PII is a legal concept, not a technical concept. Because of the versatility and power of modern re-identification algorithms, the absence of PII data does not mean that the remaining data does not identify individuals. While some attributes may be uniquely identifying on their own, any attribute can be identifying in combination with others.
