De-identifying data

PII, also known as personal information or personal data, is any information about an identifiable individual. There are two types of PII – direct and indirect. Examples of direct identifiers include your name, your address, a photograph of you, or a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag associated with you. Indirect identifiers, on the other hand, are any pieces of information that don't explicitly refer to you as an individual, but somehow make it easier to identify you. Examples of indirect identifiers include your license plate number, your bank account number, the link to your profile on a social networking site, or your place of employment.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 ways to deal with direct and indirect personal identifiers – either you decide to...