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• Your introduction to personally identifiable information : What is PII ?

  15 janvier 2020, par Joselyn Khor — Analytics Tips, Privacy, Security
  When it comes to personally identifiable information (PII), people are becoming more concerned with data privacy. Identifiable information can be used for illegal purposes like identity theft and fraud. 

  So how can you protect yourself as an innocent web browser ?

  If you’re a website owner – how do you protect users and your company from falling prey to privacy breaches ?

  As one of the most trusted analytics companies, we feel our readers would benefit from being as informed as possible about data privacy issues and PII. Learn how you can keep yours or others’ information safe.

  

  Table of Contents

  What does PII stand for ?

  PII acronym

  PII is an acronym for personally identifiable information.

  PII definition

  Personally identifiable information (PII) is a term mainly used in the United States.

  The appendix of OMB M-10-23 (Guidance for Agency Use of Third-Party Website and Applications) gives this definition for PII :

  “The term ‘personally identifiable information’ refers to information which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, such as their name, social security number, biometric records, etc. alone, or when combined with other personal or identifying information which is linked or linkable to a specific individual, such as date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.”

  What can be considered personally identifiable information (PII) ? Some PII examples :

  • Full name/usernames
  • Home address/mailing address
  • Email address
  • Credit card numbers
  • Date of birth
  • Phone numbers
  • Login details

  • Precise locations
  • Account numbers
  • Passwords
  • Security codes (including biometric records)
  • Personal identification numbers
  • Driver license number
  • Get a more comprehensive list here

  What’s non-PII ?

  Anonymous information, or information that can’t be traced back to an individual, can be considered non-PII. 

  Who is affected by the exploitation of PII ?

  Anyone can be affected by the misuse of personal data. Websites can compromise your privacy by mishandling or illegally selling/sharing your data. That may lead identity theft, account fraud and account takeovers. The fear is falling victim to such fraudulent activity. 

  PII can also be an issue when employees have access to the database and the data is not encrypted. For example, anyone working in a bank can access your accounts ; and anyone working at Facebook can read your messages. This shows how privacy breaches can easily happen when employees have access to PII.

  Website owner’s responsibility for data privacy (PII and analytics)

  If you’re using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics or Matomo, best practise is to not collect PII if possible. This is to better respect your website visitor’s privacy. 

  If you work in an industry which needs people to share personal information (e.g. healthcare, security industries, public sector), then you must collect and handle this data securely. 

  

  The US National Institute of Standards and Technology states : “The likelihood of harm caused by a breach involving PII is greatly reduced if an organisation minimises the amount of PII it uses, collects, and stores. For example, an organisation should only request PII in a new form if the PII is absolutely necessary.” 

  How you’re held accountable remains up to the privacy laws of the country you’re doing business in. Make sure you are fully aware of the privacy and data protection laws that relate specifically to you. 

  To reduce the risk of privacy breaches, try collecting as little PII as you can ; purging it as soon as you can ; and making sure your IT security is updated and protected against security threats. 

  With data collection tools like web analytics, data may be tracked through features like User ID, custom variables, and custom dimensions. Sometimes they are also harder to identify when they are present, for example, in page URLs, page titles, or referrers URLs. So make sure you’re optimising your web analytics tools’ settings to ensure you’re asking your users for consent and respecting users’ privacy.

  If you’re using a GDPR compliant tool like Matomo, learn how you can stop processing such personal data

  PII, GDPR and businesses in the US/EU

  You may get confused when considering PII and GDPR (which applies in the EU). The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives people in the EU more rights over “personal data” – which covers more identifiers than PII (more on PII vs personal data below). GDPR restricts the collection and processing of personal data so businesses need to handle this personal data carefully. 

  According to the GDPR, you can be fined up to 4% of their yearly revenue for data/privacy breaches or non-compliance. 

  

  In the US, there isn’t one overarching data protection law, but there are hundreds of laws on both the federal and state levels to protect PII of US residents. US Congress has enacted industry-specific statutes related to data privacy like HIPAA. Recently state of California also passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). 

  To be on the safe side, if you’re using analytics, follow matters relating to “personal data” in the GDPR. It covers more when it comes to protecting user privacy. GDPR rules still apply whenever an EU citizen visits any non EU site (that processes personal data).

  Personally identifiable information (PII) vs personal data

  PII and “personal data” aren’t used interchangeably. All personal data can be PII, but not all PII can be defined as personal data.

  The definition of “personal data” according to the GDPR :

  

  This means “personal data” covers more identifiers, including online identifiers. Examples include : IP addresses and URL names. As well as seemingly “innocent” data like height, job position, company etc. 

  What’s seen as personal data depends on the context. If a piece of information can be combined with others to establish someone’s identity then that can be considered personal data. 

  Under GDPR, when processing personal data, you need explicit consent. So best to be compliant according to GDPR definitions of “personal data” not just what’s considered “PII”.

  How do you keep PII safe ?

  • Try not to give your data away so easily. Read through terms and conditions.
  • Don’t just click ‘agree’ when faced with consent screens, as consent screens are majorly flawed. 
  • Disable third party cookies by default. 
  • Use strong passwords.
  • Be wary of public wifi – hackers can easily access your PII or sensitive data. Use a VPN (virtual private network)
  • Read more on how to keep PII safe. For businesses here’s a checklist on PII compliance.

  How Matomo deals with PII and personal data

  Although Matomo Analytics is a web analytics tool that tracks user activity on your website, we take privacy and PII very seriously – on both our Cloud and On-Premise offerings. 

  If you’re using Matomo and would like to know how you can be fully GDPR compliant and protect user privacy, read more :
  

  • Learn how to not process any personally identifiable information – Anonymise IP addresses, user IDs, and order IDs
  • Matomo protects user privacy by talking the talk and walking the walk
  • Stay ahead of the GDPR with a privacy-respecting analytics platform
  • 11 ways Matomo helps you protect your visitor’s privacy

  Disclaimer

  We are not lawyers and don’t claim to be. The information provided here is to help give an introduction to issues you may encounter when dealing with PII. We encourage every business and website to take data privacy seriously and discuss these issues with your lawyer if you have any concerns. 

  Additional resources :

  • https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/identity-theft-statistics.html#identity-theft-trends-in-2019
  • https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en
  • https://iclg.com/practice-areas/data-protection-laws-and-regulations/usa
  • https://www.csoonline.com/article/3215864/how-to-protect-personally-identifiable-information-pii-under-gdpr.html
  • https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/key-definitions/what-is-personal-data/

• Today we celebrate Data Privacy Day 2019

  28 janvier 2019, par Jake Thornton — Privacy
  Today we celebrate Data Privacy Day 2019 !!!

  What is Data Privacy Day ?

  Wikipedia tells us that : The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices.

  Our personal data is our online identity. When you think what personal data means – our phone records, credit card transactions, GPS position, IP addresses, browsing history and so much more. All so valuable and personal to us as human beings.

  That’s why we cannot take our personal data online for granted. We have a right to know which websites collect our data and how it’s then used, something that’s often not visible or easily recognisable when browsing.

  What Data Privacy Day means to Matomo

  Every year the team at Matomo uses this day as a chance to reflect on how far the Matomo (formerly Piwik) project has come. But then also reflect how far we still have to go in spreading the message that our data and personal information online matters.

  2018 saw the introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect people’s data online. As a team, Matomo was at the forefront of this development in the analytics space and have since built a GDPR Manager to ensure our users can be fully compliant with the GDPR.

  With every new release of Matomo, we are ensuring that security continues to be at the highest standard and we will continue to be committed to our bug bounty program. Our most recent release of Matomo 3.8.0 alone added a Two Factor Authentication (2FA) feature and a password brute force prevention.

  What next for Matomo and data privacy ?

  As always, security is a top priority for every new release of Matomo and continues to only get better and better. We have a duty to spread our message further that the protection of personal data matters and today is a vital reminder of that. We are, and forever will be, the #1 open-source (and free to use) web analytics platform in the world that fully respects user privacy and gives our users 100% data ownership.

  In 2018 we changed our name, we updated our logo and website, and advanced our platform to compete with the most powerful web analytics tools in the world, all so we can spread our message further and continue our mission.

  Come with us on this exciting journey. Now is the time to take back control of your data and let’s continue creating a safer web for everyone.

  Please help us spread this message.

• Presentation of Piwik’s collaborative translations platform : oTrance [Interview]

  19 avril 2013, par matt — Community, translation

  Piwik enables domain administrators, hobbyists, power users, personal website builders and everyone in between to access enormous amounts of data for website analytics. To support all those users, Piwik needs to be available in a number of different languages. From the start, we made internationalization (i18n) part of Piwik’s DNA. There are now dozens active volunteers who help make sure each language is well represented in the latest official release of Piwik. As of now, Piwik is available in 48 languages.

  Recently a new tool became available that makes the translation of Piwik much easier. The software we are using is an open source platform called oTrance. It has made our translation architecture more robust, and it allows us to expedite the timely delivery of high quality and up-to-date translations to the thousands of people who rely on Piwik every day.

  We’ve met with oTrance creator and lead developer Daniel Schlichtholz who answered a few questions for us.

  1. What is oTrance ?
  2. What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?
  3. Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  What is oTrance ?

  oTranCe is the short form of “Online Translation Center”. It was born because I needed a translation platform for my project MySQLDumper.

  Many languages have been added by the community and manual maintenance became more and more time consuming. I wanted to change that. So I searched for an existing platform I could use and tested a lot of approaches. To put a long story short : none of the given solutions satisfied my needs.

  From the view of a translator maintaining a language should be as easy as possible. In most cases they have to install a program on their local machine or the workflow was too difficult. A translator doesn’t want to struggle with technical things ; he just wants to translate the phrases and wants to know the progress.

  That’s the main goal we want to reach : to make the translation process as easy as possible.

  What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?

  Ease of use is one advantage of oTranCe compared to other solutions. Another advantage is that project administrators can install oTranCe on their own server – so nobody is dependant of a third party provider.

  We love to get feedback from other users. User feedback influences the way oTranCe is developed. We believe that this way oTranCe satisfies the requirements of the real world.

  We also have extensive user documentation, in our “Working with oTranCe” wiki. We try to document use cases in an understandable way. We don’t write down marketing buzz words, but try to explain the use from the view of the user/administrator.

  Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  The language files can be exported to version control and oTranCe can commit changes to the target repository. Currently we support export to Subversion, and we are working on a Git export adapter, which will be released soon.

  Another issue we are trying to solve is the context problem. When your project uses many different phrases the translator often doesn’t know in which context the current phrase is used. Version 1.1.0 (not released yet, but you can grab the latest developer version from GitHub) introduces the oTranCe-connector. The idea behind it : a small plug in grabs the used phrases/keys on the current page, and on click this list is submitted to oTranCe, where the translator can edit the words. This way the translator knows in which context these phrases are used. I wrote a small plug in for OXID eShop. Since it is really easy to implement, my hope is that other plug ins for other applications will be added by the community.

  Matthieu : Congratulations Daniel for having created such an awesome Translation Platform. At Piwik we are really thankful for oTranCe, which has resulted in much better translation process, and happier translators. Keep up the good work !

  If you are a Piwik user, and if you want to participate in translating Piwik, please sign up for an account on oTrance and become part of the team making Piwik available in more languages across the world.