Protecting Personal Identifiable Information

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These days one cannot be too careful in regards to personal identifiable information, also known as PII. To be able to understand the risk of PII, we need to be able to understand the rights and responsibilities of protecting personal information of ourselves and others and how to mitigate the risk of compromising this information. At the end of the day it all comes down to privacy, which is the freedom of intrusion of personal information.

In the early 1970s, the quantity of information collected by the United Sates government received an immense amount of public attention. By 1974 the Privacy Act was enacted. The establishment of the law helped restrict the release of PII and establish a code to regulate collection and use of information …show more content…

Information such as social security numbers, age, birth date, home address, bank account information, medical information are all just some basic overlying examples of PII. It is any type of information and/or data that can identify you as a person.

When it comes to the privacy of an individual, it is everyone’s responsibilities to protect this sensitive information. As stated above those are the most simplistic and overlying criteria for PII, but it goes far beyond the reach of just basic information about a person. How about the information collected on a person from an online business? This information might not be identifiable at the time it is collected but it very well may be later on when someone has some type of unauthorized access to it. The information about you and the things one may search on the Internet it worth real value to companies.

Have you ever noticed the little pop up ads on the sides of you search engines? Normal it is things of interest to you. This is what a big company calls “data mining.” According to Frand (2016), data mining is any facts, numbers, or text that can be processed by a computer. Today, organizations are accumulating vast and growing amounts of data in different formats and different databases. We can conclude that this can be an abundant amount of information collected on a single person online in the form of data (Frand …show more content…

The phishing tactic can be a direct result of a data breach. For example, the OPM data breach of 2015 affected around 21 million individuals, from that information fraudsters are able to try and phish for information previously saved and collect on a person from the federal government. Also, there was the data breach of Target in 2014 that compromised approximately 40 million debit cards and credit card information. This personal information stolen will be used in many fraudulent ways and leads people to think about how safe is our personal information and how can we protect

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