Personal Identifiable Information
I have seen a lot of posts online, be it on Facebook, Instagram, or even WhatsApp, that can be used to trace your identity or even your family. A lot of people these days have businesses from their homes and post their addresses on these platforms without thinking about the repercussions of doing so. Your identity doesn’t just come from your SSN (social security number) in the US, your Aadhar card information (in India), or your passport or Driver’s License information. Did you know that just with your zipcode, your year of birth, and your gender, your identity can be 85% identifiable? This is not just for you, but for your children and their children as well. I see a lot of posts with children’s complete names being posted online. We need to be actively trying to protect their privacy and their information until they are older.
So what is Personally Identifiable Information?
The Department of Homeland Security actually has a handbook on how to safeguard it – you can find the handbook here. Personally Identifiable Information or PII is any information that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information that is linked or linkable to that individual, regardless of whether the individual is a US citizen, legal permanent resident, etc., etc. There are multiple things about you that are PII – this includes your license plate number, your phone number, and geographic data. When you post information about your children – while including their date of birth, the weight they were born, their height, their location, you are divulging very sensitive quasi-identifiers to potential hackers. This in addition to your personal data that your post – you can become a target to not just hackers but also for identity theft.
Posting information about your parents (sometimes includes your mother’s maiden name), your pets, and your vehicles (my first car, my first Tesla, etc.), you are divulging all the information a hacker would need to log into your bank. These are the usual questions that banks, hospitals, and other organizations ask as security questions. While these are not the only questions that are used as security questions, these are the most common ones that we choose as they are easily remembered. Hackers can use the information we post online to build a profile on us. This information can be sold on the Dark Web for a few couple of bucks. Your address history can be bought online for just a dollar. All of this makes you wonder why we were never warned about all of this, because remember the old Facebook? Most of us tagged our uncles, aunts, cousins, parents, and whoever we can back in the 2000s. We have given people our mothers’ maiden name, and any other information that we post on Facebook. That brings into question, did Facebook do this on purpose?
Even if you hide all this information to be able to be revealed to those among you on your friends list, when was the last time you had a look at who is on your profile? Are all 500+ of those on my Facebook or Instagram that I still recognize? Do we even have the time to go through all of those we “friended” and decide if they are still our friends? Who knows?!
Let’s look at our children’s information for one second, and I think this is more important than us posting our information online (because, let’s be honest, we are screwed!). We are taking their autonomy over their privacy away from their hands. We are posting pictures and videos of their childhood for the world to see. The argument could be that – but these are my close friends. Again, this is where our prior conversation comes in. With all the information we post online, it is not very hard to duplicate our information into a new fake profile and start following you. The information, including their date of birth, the first street they lived on, their first friends, their pets, their parents, grandparents, is all now available online. Even putting aside the pedophiles aside, it is really easy to steal your babies’ information from your profile.
We need to take a stance and protect our children’s information from going online. Let us give the control back to our children when they are old enough to make that choice. Until then as parents it is our responsibility to protect theirs and make sure no one else is taking that autonomy away from them.
Resources for learning more about PII – IBM, University of Pittsburg overview, NIH,