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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/

• How to verify user permissions – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  9 novembre 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the next post of our blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform (our previous post was How to make your plugin multilingual). This time you’ll learn how to verify user permissions. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP and the Piwik platform.

  When should a plugin verify permissions ?

  Usually you want to do this before executing any action – such as deleting or fetching data – and before rendering any sensitive information that should not be accessible by everyone. For instance in an API method or Controller action. You sometimes also need to verify permissions before registering menu items or widgets.

  How does Piwik’s user management work ?

  It is quite simple as it only differentiates between a few roles : View permission, Admin permission and Super User permission. If you manage multiple websites with Piwik a user can be assigned to different roles as a user might have no permission for some websites but view or admin permission for another set of websites.

  Worth mentioning is that roles inherit from each other. This means the role admin automatically includes the role view and a super user automatically covers the view and admin role.

  Getting started

  In this post, we assume that you have already set up your development environment and created a plugin. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik and other Guides that help you to develop a plugin.

  Verifying user permissions

  To protect your data the platform offers many convenient methods in the \Piwik\Piwik class. There you will find methods that either start with check, is or has. While methods that start with check throw an exception in case a condition is not met, the other methods return a boolean true or false.

  Use methods that throw an exception if you want to stop any further execution in case a user does not have an appropriate role. The platform will catch the exception and display an error message or ask the user to log in.

  public function deleteAllMessages()
  {
      // delete messages only if user has super user access, otherwise show an error message
      Piwik::checkUserSuperUserAccess();
   
      $this->getModel()->deleteAllMessages();
  }
  Télécharger

  Use methods that return a boolean for instance when registering menu items or widgets.

  public function configureAdminMenu(MenuAdmin $menu)
  {
      if (Piwik::hasUserSuperUserAccess()) {
          $menu->addPlatformItem('Plugins', $this->urlForDefaultAction());
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  It is important to be aware that just because the menu item won’t be displayed in the UI a user can still open the registered URL manually. Therefore you have to check for permissions in the actual controller action as well.

  View permission

  A user having a view permission should be only able to view reports but not make any changes apart from his personal settings. The methods that end with UserHasSomeViewAccess make sure a user has at least view permission for one website whereas the methods *UserHasViewAccess($idSites = array(1,2,3)) check whether a user has view access for all of the given websites.

  Piwik::checkUserHasSomeViewAccess();
   
  Piwik::checkUserHasViewAccess($idSites = array(1,2,3));
  Télécharger

  As a plugin developer you would usually use the latter example to verify the permissions for specific websites. Use the first example in case you develop something like an “All Websites Dashboard” where you only want to make sure the user has a view permission for at least one website.

  Admin permission

  A user having an admin permission cannot only view reports but also change website related settings. The methods to check for this role are similar to the ones before, just swap the term View with Admin.

  Piwik::checkUserHasSomeAdminAccess();
   
  Piwik::checkUserHasAdminAccess($idSites = array(1,2,3));
  Télécharger

  Super user permission

  A user having the super user permission is allowed to access all of the data stored in Piwik and change any settings. To check if a user has this role use one of the methods that end with UserSuperUserAccess.

  Piwik::checkUserHasSuperUserAccess();

  As a plugin developer you would check for this permission for instance in places where your plugin shows an activity log over all users or where it offers the possibility to change any system wide settings.

  Getting information about the currently logged in user

  Sometimes you might want to know which user is currently logged in. This can be useful if you want to persist user related information in the database or if you want to send an email to the currently logged in user. You can easily get this information by calling the following methods :

  $login = Piwik::getCurrentUserLogin()
  $email = Piwik::getCurrentUserEmail()
  Télécharger

  Advanced features

  Of course there is more that you can do. For instance you can verify whether a user is an anonymous user or whether a user has a specific role. You can also perform any operation in the context of a super user even if the current user does not have this role. Would you like to know more about those features ? Check out the Piwik class reference, the Security guide and the Manage Users user guide.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• Is it allowed to embed the ffmpeg.exe in my project ? [on hold]

  22 juillet 2019, par Snowy White

  I have written a program that, among other things, does some audio format converting. I use a library which in turn uses the ffmpeg.exe for this. So at the moment, the user needs to have ffmpeg in the same directory as the program itself. But what I would prefer is to add ffmpeg to my project as an embedded resource, so that the users don’t need to care about that. And now my question is, as I have seen that ffmpeg is licensed under LGPL, would it be legal to do so ? Or do the users explicitly have to get ffmpeg by themself ?
  Thank you for any answers in advance !