The data protection of EU citizens under the GDPR is officially at risk as Helen Dixon, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), publicly stated that the Irish Regulator does not decide on many citizens’ complaints. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has a huge responsibility on her shoulders because most of the tech giants (think Google or Facebook) have their … Read More
What is the LGPD and What Does It Mean For You?
As technology grows, every company strives to keep up with each data compliance update, especially in their home country. But what happens when you’ve got clients in Brazil, or want to take your company international? Is Brazil’s new LGPD simply another version of GDPR, or is it something more? Introducing the LGPD Only coming into effect as of September 2020, … Read More
The What, Why, and How of PII Auditing
You’ve heard stories of companies running into trouble by not maintaining PII compliance and suffering severe legal ramifications. But what does that mean for you? Out of all the data you have, you’re sure you don’t have any PII lurking around in unwanted or even unlawful areas, right…? Ready or not, your next scheduled PII audit is around the corner. … Read More
What Are Sensitive Data Discovery Tools and How Do They Work?
With technology progressing and changing every day, it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with the times. As a business, however, falling behind can mean letting important (and legally binding) information fall through the cracks, disappointing customers and losing the trust of business partners. This is where sensitive data discovery tools come into play. But what exactly are they … Read More
Detect person names in text: Part 2 (Technical)
In Detect Person Names in Text: Part 1 (Results), we benchmarked our new named entity recognizer (NER) against popular open source alternatives, such as Stanford NER, Stanza and SpaCy. Today we dig a little deeper into the NER architecture and technical details. First, recall our main NER objectives. In short, we require our NER to be practical, rather than just … Read More
Detect person names in text: Part 1 (Results)
Detecting people’s names is part and parcel of PII discovery. Traditional techniques like regexps and keywords don’t work, because the set of all names is too varied. How do open source Named Entity Recognition (NER) engines compare, and can we do better? This Part 1 has NER results and benchmarks. There’s also Part 2 with technical neural network details. Developing … Read More
How to evaluate PII discovery software
So, you’re considering buying software for discovery of PII / PCI / PHI. Or about to start your trial of PII Tools. How to test discovery SW properly? Don’ts: Careful what you test for Consider the following “passport”: Why won’t PII Tools detect the “PII” in this passport scan? This is an actual file submitted to our support team during … Read More
Finding Affected Persons in a Data Breach
There was a data breach, the clock starts ticking. The dataset is large. How do you quickly determine who’s affected and how? Who’s Data Was Breached? Manual discovery of sensitive information is tedious and costly, so automated solutions like PII Tools come in handy. In its latest 3.7.0 release, we implemented new features in PII Tools to support breach workflows. … Read More
Exclude PII / PCI / PHI From a Breach Report
When responding to a breach incident, having a clear idea who’s affected and how is a matter of urgency. Manual discovery of PII information is tedious and costly, so automated solutions come in handy. But how to deal with false positives? PII Exclusions One typical task during a data review is removing unwanted data instances. PII Tools already automates PII … Read More
How To Automate Personal Data Discovery
The recent wave of privacy legislations around the world introduced new challenges to experts in litigation support, incident response and auditing. How can modern automation help with reliable PII discovery across emails, files, and databases? 3 Reasons Keywords Fail Traditional approaches based on manually defined keywords and regular expressions fail for three fundamental reasons: High cost. Keywords and regexps are … Read More
