personal identifiable information
Privacy

Security Innovation: What is PII and How Can I Protect My Private Information?

Search Encrypt is sharing Security Innovation‘s insight on how to protect your private information online. Security Innovation is a software security company specializing in testing and assessing different platforms, including IoT, for their security.

What is PII?

According to Security Innovation, “PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information. This can be labeled as any data that could potentially identify or be traced to a specfic individual.”

This information includes user names and social media accounts, as well as social security numbers, financial records, credit card numbers and medical records. While other information that may be linked to you may seem to be “personally identifiable”, your IP address, device IDs and cookies don’t fall into this category.

Christine Schulz, Digital Marketing Manager at Security Innovation, then explains how to protect your personally identifiable information.

How To Protect Your Personally Identifiable Information

  • Keep your office secure. Minimizing your exposure to threats by locking your computer when not in use, shredding sensitive documents, etc. will help information from falling into the wrong hands.
  • Encrypt your sensitive data. Storing private information on external hard drives or flash drives is dangerous if not encrypted. Encryption helps protect this data if you lose the devices it is stored on.
  • Share information carefully. Most websites will store some information about you, especially site you have to login to. Your online payroll provider, shopping sites, and social media all have information stored about you. Don’t add unnecessary information and delete unused accounts if possible to keep this information safer.
  • Beware of phishing. Phishing is the number one way hackers access user data. Learning how to identify phishing before it’s too late can protect your information when it matters.
  • Use internet security best practices. Using smart passwords, avoiding unsafe websites and being proactive with you data privacy will make the biggest impact in staying safe online. Try these 8 Ways to Protect Your Digital Privacy.

Read the original article from Security Innovation

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