De-identifying data

PII, also called personal information or personal data, is any information relating to an identifiable person. There are two types of PII – direct and indirect. Examples of direct identifiers are your name, your address, a picture of you, or an Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) associated with you. Indirect identifiers, on the other hand, are all those pieces of information that don't explicitly refer to you as a person, but somehow make it easier to identify you. Examples of indirect identifiers are your license plate number, your bank account number, the link to your profile on a social network, or your place of work.

The practice of de-identifying data is to manipulate PPIs so that it is no longer possible to identify the person who generated them.

There are two options for handling direct and indirect personal identifiers – either you decide to destroy them completely, or you decide to keep them separated from the rest of the data...