Sometimes, it feels like the goal of tech agencies and federal regulations, such as the GDPR, is to confuse us. Unless you’re used to using terms like “protected information” and “sensitive data” and seeing acronyms like PII, PCI, HIPAA, etc., this topic can seem a little daunting. So, let’s break it down and learn the exact differences between frequently used … Read More
How to Identify Personal Data in the 21st Century
Personal data comes in many shapes and sizes. As business owners, company employees, and internet consumers, it’s our job to know what personal data is and how to locate and protect it. But now that the new millennium is well on its way, is there any new technology out there that can help? Where to Get Started? Step one is … Read More
Learning the Difference Between Data Privacy and Data Security
Companies often believe that by securing their sensitive data, they automatically comply with the requirements of various data privacy regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, etc.). Unfortunately, this is not the case. Let’s take a look at these two terms to understand the difference and make sure you adhere to both. It’s a bad habit to treat data security and data privacy … Read More
Data protection of EU citizens jeopardized
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
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
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
