This phrase, sometimes shortened to PII, unfortunately doesn’t have a standard definition. It means different things to different organizations, in different policies or legislation, and across different sectors.

Generally, it is understood to mean any singular datum or group of data that could identify an individual. It may be obvious that a name is personally identifying, but many other demographic or profile data depend on the context. For example, age can be identifying if you are collecting data from a sample with an average age of 50, but one participant is 87. Gender may be identifying if your sample is predominately one gender. 

Check out our articles: Your information will be kept confidential: Confidentiality and Anonymity in Evaluation and Encrypting and Anonymizing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in Raw Data

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