In today’s digital age, protecting personally identifiable information (PII) has become integral to any data protection framework. Since PII is essential to individual data protection, businesses and organizations must develop a robust data protection shield from unauthorized access and misuse to ensure your personal information is safe and secure.
One crucial means to oblige organizations to follow is the regulatory measures and their constant changes due to digital development. Through the constantly evolving nature of the digital world, the regulatory landscape surrounding PII compliance has also undergone significant changes.
These changes affect Major data protection regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD). Understanding these regulatory changes can ensure the privacy and security of personal data. Based on jurisdictional variations in different regions.
Key Takeaways
- Meeting PII compliance requirements is a crucial part of the data protection framework due to the evolving nature of the regulatory landscape.
- PII compliance necessitates understanding its constituents, global regulatory frameworks, requirements, and data security measures.
- PII compliance can reach best practices through proper data mapping, access control, regular audits, and assessments.
PII and Its Related Scope
Personally identifiable information (PII) refers to any typical information that can be used to identify a person. However, there is more to this definition, as this PII data can be differentiated in terms of sensitivity, importance, and context in which they are used.
PII Constituents
PII can include individual information such as name and last name and more general information such as race and gender. This information will bring identification that details personal information and all relevant data, such as regional or geological specificity. In other words, PII can include two kinds of identification categories:
- Direct identification comprises name, address, social security number or different identifying number or code, telephone number, email address, face, home address, and fingerprints
- Indirect identification includes all data by which other specific individuals in conjunction with other data elements such as gender, race, birth date, and geographic indicator.
Sensitive and Non-sensitive PII
Although personally identifiable information is essential, some are more significant than others. Therefore, PII can be categorized as:
- Sensitive PII: The data includes your full name, social security number, phone number, driver’s license, financial information, and medical records.
- Non-sensitive PII: This data includes name or phone number, zip code, race, gender, and date of birth.
Context and PII Classification
Recognizing the context can help you categorize the PII as sensitive or non-sensitive. For example, while a person’s full name could be public data, it would be sensitive data in the list of doctors’ patients, or when a person’s phone number could be publicly available if it is used for two-factor authentication, it is sensitive PII.
Global Regulatory Frameworks
Various regulations define PII differently while highlighting and excluding attributes to determine constituents of PII.
Major Data Protection Regulations and PII
- GDPR: The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines PII as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person; an identifiable natural person can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, […], physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person”.
- CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act): Having been in effect since 2020, CCPA defines PII as
- Direct identifiers such as real name, alias, home address, and email address
- Indirect identifiers such as unique identifiers, usernames, and account names
- Biometric data like fingerprints, retina scans, and facial recognition data
- Geolocation data, including mobile device location history, geolocation data associated with app activity such as photos and videos
- Protected class data like race, gender, sexual orientation, and nationality
Jurisdictional Variations in PII Compliance Requirements
Depending on the use case, a piece of information can be viewed differently as PII in various jurisdictions. For example, HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) defines PII as identifiable information relating to an individual’s past, present, or future health status. In contrast, CPRA defines PII as any information that “identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.” CPRA also introduced the concept of ‘sensitive personal information” that obliges organizations to respect data subject access requests for collecting and processing this type of information.
Complexities of International Data Transfer
When sending or transmitting identifiable personal data from one country to another, defining PII can be different through international privacy regulations. One of the biggest challenges for organizations that seek international business is to navigate the complexities of global data transfers. Your organization must understand the GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD and their specific PII compliance requirements to avoid penalties and reputational damage.
Minimum PII Compliance Requirements
Regardless of differences in what data is considered PII among various international regulators, all regulations have some foundational criteria to define PII. All regulations agree on the lawful and fair process of collecting and maintaining PII and the necessary transparency your organization must put forward to process PII and its relevant data.
Foundational Requirements for PII Protection
Although various jurisdictions present various legal definitions of PII, the foundational requirements come as a checklist to provide the most common practices of PII compliance requirements. For example, all regulations agree that PII data processing principles must be:
- Lawful, fair, and transparent
- Be done for necessary purposes only
- Be limited wherever possible
- Accurate & timely
- Be completed within a defined time frame
- Be encrypted through multi-factor authentication
- Appropriate cookie and consent management
Lawful and Fair Processing of PII
As a main PII data processing principle, GDPR highlights that PII data processing must be lawful and fair. To be fair and lawful, the GDPR highlights the lawful bases of the PII as follows:
- Consent: The individual consents to processing their data for a specific purpose.
- Contract: The PII processing entails your contract with the individual as steps you must take before entering into a contract.
- Legal Obligation: The PII processing is necessary to comply with the legal law and obligations
- Vital Interests: The processing is necessary to protect subject data.
Transparency and Consent Mechanism
Transparency is essential, especially in the virtual world where you have no direct relationship with the individual and collect their data from another source. In this case, your organization must give individuals the knowledge of what data you are collecting and use their data through a consent policy available online on your website.
Data Mapping and Inventory
While data mapping can create comprehensive inventories of all data, including personally identifiable information (PII), your organization can appropriately classify and label data. This kind of data mapping will enable your organization to apply the necessary controls or to stay aligned with data privacy regulations.
Accurate Data Mapping for Effective PII Compliance
Data mapping is a solid strategy to reach data compliance, part of which deals with PII compliance. Through visual representation, a comprehensive data map can help bridge informational gaps and standardize data. It provides a map showing where PII data is stored, how you hold it, and how you connect it.
Comprehensive Inventory of PII Assets
Since the data inventory is the primary storage center for the PII within your organization’s data warehouse, the PII data inventory must include five primary areas to meet the necessary data privacy and compliance framework:
- Consider Personal Data and its Relevant Categories: Consider all personal data in your storage and list all personal data types you collect. At last, conduct a risk-level plan to distinguish sensitive personal data.
- Provide Users and Access Controls: Be clear about who can access different levels of data, including high-risk data.
- Assign Data Locations: List the secure physical location of the personal data and Check if data is stored in duplicate or multiple locations. Set up with encryption, access controls, backups, and strong passwords.
- Conduct Data Retention: Regularly check how long you have had the data and ensure the data retention agrees with your data retention policy.
- Consider Purpose and Legal Basis: Always check who the data belongs to and what the personal data is used for.
Technology Solutions for Efficient Data Mapping
Along with corporate compliance solutions, technology solutions can create accurate data mapping for effective PII compliance. The technology solution for appropriate PII compliance can include:
- Comprehensive inventories of PII assets to help collect, locate, and control data flows.
- Data discovery tools will streamline data processes through their automatic and free of human error and accurate mapping.
- Modern data mapping tools will help visualize and manage data.
Access Controls and Security Measures
To stay aligned with PII compliance, a data access control plan, encryption, and regular security updates can account for PII’s security.
Robust Access Controls for Safeguarding PII
By implementing strict access controls, you can regularly review and update data access permissions. To reach this level of access control:
- Limit access to sensitive PII to only those who need it
- Monitor access through robust monitoring tools, especially for sensitive PII data
PII Encryption, Data Transit, and Status
Regardless of the data’s state – whether at rest in a database, in transit across the internet, or even in use- the encryption of the PII data can add an extra layer of security to protect against unauthorized access.
Regular Security Measures and Emerging Threats
Regular updates of security measures can help your organization have better data management and, consequently, better risk management through:
- Restriction of access to authorized personnel
- Implementation of multi-factor authentication
- Regular review and update of user permissions
Data Breach Response and Notification
You can wholly avoid cyber-attacks and threats with all security measures at work. Therefore, a proactive data breach plan can work effectively to both protect data, including PII data, and ensure data compliance.
Clear and Effective Data Breach Response Plan
A data breach response plan is an effective way to better look at cybersecurity incidents, the bad actors involved, and the required follow-up actions. Investing in a data breach plan can build trust with your customers and resiliently bounce back from data breaches without severe damage to your business. Therefore, you must consider these five steps:
- Define Breach: Identify what constitutes a breach, like the possible scenarios that can happen to people, data, applications, or entire systems.
- Identify Response Teams: identify people in their data breach response team, define their roles, and provide a contact list of the response team. You know who to call or contact in case of data breaches.
- Develop a Contact List: Determine people you must contact in case of a cyber security risk or emergency. The list can include regulatory authorities’ contact information and third-party companies.
- Formulate Effective Communication Plans: Prepare various pre-written statements that are easily adaptable to different customers and can provide a thorough picture of the breach’s impact to all the related stakeholders.
Legal Obligations for Timely Breach Notifications
Any state or law has a different outline than the timely breach notification. For example, according to HIPAA, breach notification must be notified within a specified timeframe, depending on the number of records breached. On the other hand, in the GDPR, the controller shall inform the breach without undue delay and, where feasible, 72 hours after becoming aware of a breach. Moreover, according to CCPA, data breaches must be notified within 72 hours if unencrypted data is involved or if an unauthorized user can access encrypted data encryption keys.
Post-incident Assessments for Continuous Improvement
Despite best efforts, data breaches may still occur. Therefore, conducting a post-incident analysis can help identify the root cause, vulnerabilities exploited, and lessons learned about response procedures. To improve your organization’s data protection quality, you must
- Coordinate with the incident response team to ensure all team members are on the same page and verify the status of the system state.
- Evaluate the current incident response plan to find if the plan had been effective in notifying the data breach in a reasonable amount of time or if the right personnel was available to respond and recovery and restoration happened as expected.
- Implement new incident response strategies and proactive measures to find flaws in the current incident response plan and try recent changes through or out of your organization.
Employee Training and Awareness
Training employees on handling PII data is the crucial stage to reach data protection. The process of training employees can range from educating employees, especially concerning PII compliance and data protection integration into onboarding programs, to periodic training sessions.
Educating Employees on PII Compliance
You can put data protection into best practices by training employees, meeting privacy regulations and security measures, and reporting incident procedures on time.
Integrating Data Protection into Employee Onboarding Programs
By Integrating data security awareness into employee onboarding, you can provide interactive training by
- Enhancing employees’ understanding and compliance with data privacy principles, benefiting the organization’s data handling practices.
- Fostering the organization’s overall data governance strategy and align with its vision and values.
- Improving a proactive data privacy mindset and behavior among employees.
- Solidifying data privacy as a core organizational ethics.
- Encouraging ongoing commitment to data privacy principles among all staff members.
Periodic Training Sessions and Evolving Compliance Requirements
Employees are critical in maintaining PII compliance. Integrating data protection into employee onboarding programs and conducting regular training sessions will help inform your staff about evolving compliance requirements.
Vendor and Third-Party Management
Your organization is responsible for protecting your clients’ data, even in the hands of your third parties.
Assessment of PII Compliance of Vendors and Third-Party Partners
Lack of PII compliance by vendors can make your organization vulnerable to potential risks, including
- Adding your expenses in the form of regulatory fines, victim settlements, or legal fees.
- Losing customers for not trusting your organization to keep their information safe.
- Damaging your organization’s reputation through clients, shareholders, and even media that took years to build.
Contractual Safeguards for PII Protection
One of the critical steps to safeguard your customers’ data is via your contract with third parties. Involve proper statements violating PII compliance requirements. Moreover, you must involve the necessary data protection measures that vendors must consider before the contract to safeguard PII.
Regular Audits and Due Diligence for Ongoing Compliance
Since regular audits and due diligence can ensure ongoing compliance and mitigate potential risks, you must consider these five stages:
- Identify and Classify Data: Use data discovery software to establish what PII your business collects, where it is stored, and who has access to it.
- Assess Risk: You can use assessment software to identify sensitive data across all digital assets and compliance and security initiatives based on risk benchmarking.
- Review and Update Policies and Procedures: Review your organization’s policies and procedures related to PII data and keep them updated to ensure they align with the latest regulations and best practices.
- Audit PII Data: PII data audit helps protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Regular PII data audits can safeguard their sensitive data and avoid potential liabilities.
Regular Audits and Assessments
Your organization can receive the necessary data compliance solutions and more meaningful insights for better decision-making through ongoing audits.
Internal and External Audits to Evaluate PII Compliance
Internal and external audits can help manage PII compliance. For example, an external audit ensures your stakeholders that your company’s accounting records are accurate and complete and follow required legal requirements or compliance obligations. For external audits, you can outsource compliance through third-party auditors to ensure the accuracy of your organization’s financial condition and regulatory compliance.
On the other hand, through an internal audit, you can analyze your organization’s effectiveness in managing risks and the control systems that management has put in place. Internal auditors can act as ongoing consultants who provide recommendations to assist management in strengthening systems and controls.
Third-Party Assessments for Unbiased Perspective
Unbiased third-party assessments can provide qualified, independent research that helps your organization select effective data compliance solutions. Through third-party testing, you can make informed decisions about the data and active insights to protect their critical assets. Third-party assessment can also incentivize vendors to act based on their best possible cybersecurity practices.
Audit Findings for Enhancing Compliance Measures
Audit findings provide a roadmap to improvement by showing your organization’s strengths and weaknesses for better risk management and process improvement. Audit findings can also help you to
- Identify Risks: By highlighting risk areas within your organization and provide management with the necessary information to mitigate these risks.
- Improve Process: Through audit findings, you can identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement within your organization’s processes.
- Ensure Compliance: You can also easily comply with relevant laws, regulations, and standards and identify needing more third-party or PII compliance documentation.
Future-Proofing PII Compliance
The future-proofing of PII compliance depends on understanding data compliance solutions, anticipation strategies, adaptation, and the proactive approach. This way, your organization comes with the new technological advancements and privacy regulation changes.
Anticipation of Future Trends in Data Protection
PII compliance requirements entails knowledge of the future trends in the data protection landscape. The possible areas of interest in the compliance areas will include
- AI and Machine Learning Integration: The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) brings advanced algorithms to derive meaningful insights from your massive data assets. These two technologies can efficiently streamline decision-making processes and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of predictive analytics.
- Data Privacy and Ethics: With data breaches consistently threatening virtual data, focusing on data privacy and ethics is a top priority in the future data protection landscape.
- Blockchain in Data Security: Blockchain technology will secure and validate data transactions through its decentralized system, an ideal solution for enhancing data integrity and security.
Compliance Measures and Evolving Regulatory Expectations
These particular areas of compliance and regulations will be under change, and your organization should consider under the radar:
- Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs): The technology aims to minimize the personal data your organization needs to collect and process through anonymization and pseudonymization techniques.
- Data Protection: Further updates to the GDPR as lawmakers strive to keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of technology.
- Consumer Privacy as a Business Imperative: Consumer privacy has become a business imperative, shifting from mere compliance to proactive privacy protection.
Proactive Approach to Emerging Challenges
Businesses need to anticipate future trends in data protection and meet evolving regulatory expectations to stay ahead of emerging challenges. Embracing a proactive approach and continually enhancing compliance measures will help companies to future-proof PII compliance efforts.
Closing
PII compliance is vital to protect sensitive data and comply with global data protection regulations. As a part of its data protection compliance services, Captain Compliance can help your organization meet necessary data compliance requirements, implement robust security measures, train employees, and regularly audit compliance efforts.
FAQs
What is PII in compliance?
PII compliance protects any personally identifiable information such as their name, address, social security number, or email address from unauthorized access or disclosure.
Find out more about our data protection compliance services here
What are the requirements for PII compliance?
PII compliance requirements include
- Ensuring lawful and fair processing of PII
- Implementing transparency and consent mechanisms
- Establishing procedures for responding to data subject access requests
- Implementing robust security measures to protect PII
Check our article on protecting PII here
How do you comply with PII?
To comply with PII regulations, your organizations should consider and implement foundational PII compliance requirements, including:
- Data mapping
- Access controls
- Breach response plans
- Employee training
- Regular audits
- PII compliance checklist
Discover more about GDPR compliance requirements here
What are the requirements for personally identifiable information?
The requirements for personally identifiable information (PII) compliance include:
- Protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access or disclosure
- Obtaining consent for data processing
- Providing individuals with the right to access and correct their PII
- Implementing appropriate security measures to prevent data breaches
