Because PII compliance regulations vary from country to country, you should consult an IT security professional or lawyer to find out if your security measures are compliant. Nevertheless, following these PII compliance steps will help you meet most of the minimum PII compliance requirements. Under most data protection laws, the ultimate legal responsibility for protecting personal data ultimately rests with the company that controls the personal information itself. In this area, the legislation is in line with public opinion: most consumers believe that companies should be responsible for the data they use and store. Privacy Principles for Legal Providers Compliance with U.S. data protection law requires an understanding of the various laws and industry requirements for financial information, health information, and other sensitive customer information. As a starting point, law firms should consider adopting the following privacy principles to protect their clients` personal information. Sensitive personal information refers to any information that Experian believes has “legal, contractual, or ethical requirements for limited disclosure.” This includes things like Social Security numbers, passport information, bank account details or a credit card number, as well as medical records that fall under HIPAA. Overall, PII compliance can be organized into industry privacy standards or geographic privacy standards.

Industry standards dictate how personal information should be handled in a particular market, while geographic criteria include additional requirements as to where the data is stored and where the people accessing the data are located. Finally, the GDPR and most other regulations require consent to cookies. The GDPR and CCPA consider some cookies to be PII. Therefore, your organization should try to limit compliance with these PII compliance requirements by obtaining full approval from the website visitor in advance. Cookie consent tools can help. These sections are a good starting point for your PII compliance policies, which should also meet geographic or industry compliance requirements. PII protection is obviously an important and ever-evolving issue, and the details of what you are legally required to do in this area depend on the regulatory framework in which your business operates. The NIST guide linked above is actually a good place to start if you want to explore an IPI protection framework.

However, if you want a very simple checklist to give you an idea of the scale of the problem, the compliance checklist from data security provider Nightfall is a good place to start. They recommend: A strong IIP policy includes the following sections. A number of data are generally considered PII. Some of the most obvious are: data security and PII compliance tools fall into five broad categories: governance, risk, and compliance; protection of data against loss or manipulation; the ability to respond to access requests from data subjects; processing and storage of records for compliance audits; and cookie consent. Privacy Breach Notification Plan (PA), PII and BII (PPPIA), IIP But in a way, trying to identify all possible specific types of PII is a process that misses the point. More and more cybersecurity professionals and regulators are thinking about personal information, what they can do if they are abused, rather than what they actually are. We`ve already seen some of this in the GSA definition above: PII is, to be somewhat tautological, any information that can be used to identify a person, and sometimes you have to look at that information in a broader context where other information like this is also circulating. For example: Is your mother`s maiden name PII? Well, probably not. But if a hacker has your mother`s maiden name and email address and knows which bank you`re using, it could be a problem because it`s a common security question used to reset passwords. PII stands for personally identifiable information – any data that can be used to identify a specific individual. Some of the most common forms of PII include things like Social Security numbers, email addresses, and phone numbers.

PII may also refer to digital identifiers such as biometrics, geolocation, user IDs, and an IP address. Encrypt sensitive personal information on laptops, media, and other devices These compliance rules aim to protect a user`s rights over their data and include measures that dictate how a company should collect, store, process, and delete an individual`s personal data. In practice, these compliance regulations encourage companies to implement more effective and rigorous approaches to data security. The loss of personal information can result in significant harm to individuals, including identity theft or other fraudulent use of information. Because DOL employees and contractors may have access to individuals` personal information and other sensitive information, we have a special responsibility to protect such information from loss and misuse. The Ministry of Energy has a definition of what it calls high-risk PII that is relevant here: “PII that, if lost, compromised or disclosed without authorization, may result in significant harm, embarrassment, inconvenience or injustice to any person.” While this definition can be frustrating for IT professionals looking for a list of specific types of information to protect, it`s probably good policy to view PII in these terms to fully protect consumers from harm. Some privacy laws require companies to designate specific individuals who are responsible for PII. HIPAA requires companies to designate a dedicated chief privacy officer to develop and implement privacy policies. The GDPR defines several roles responsible for ensuring compliance: data subject – the person whose data is collected; Data controller – the organization that collects the data; Data processor – an organisation that processes data on behalf of the data controller and the Data Protection Officer (DPO) – a person within controllers or processing organisations who is responsible for monitoring compliance with the GDPR.

Store sensitive PII only on federal government systems. The European Union`s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2016 and has been a major upheaval in the world of PII. It established strict rules on what companies doing business in the EU or with EU citizens can do with PII, and required companies to take appropriate precautions to protect this data from hackers.