Dealing with PII

Steve Farr
Steve Farr Experian Contributor
edited December 2023 in General

Talking to a prospect today about PII - identifying it on data loaded into the system and then processing it - eg reporting its presence.


Comments appreciated


Steve

Best Answer

Answers

  • Danny Roden
    Danny Roden Administrator

    Hey Steve,

    First step is to figure out specifically what data elements you want to identify under 'PII' (e.g. name, address, email, dob, telephone, credit card, cookie etc).

    Then build rules that help you detect each type of PII data using the functions available within the product. Some useful functions include:

    • Contains Match - references a lookup table to find presence of certain words/values/formats/terms in each field (in the example below I used this function to identify Names by doing a lookup to a table of Titles)
    • Matches Expression - utilise some of the regular expressions that the product ships with to identify some common types of data (e.g. postcode, telephone number, email address, credit card). Equally you can add your own, in the glossary (e.g. loyalty card number, cookies etc)
    • Matches Format - define your own formats in the function (e.g. dates)
    image.png

    Using a combination of these functions will allow you to not only detect PII data (true/false), but categorise it (e.g. email, tel etc.) and locate it (e.g. which fields contain it).

    See below for a screenshot of a quick example I just built:

    Screenshot of PII Analysis.png
  • Danny Roden
    Danny Roden Administrator

    FYI @Steve I've built this out into a slightly more detailed post (here) with some examples of how this can be taken a little further to allow you to automatically detect the presence of PII on an automated basis (e.g. with regular data feeds from external suppliers/partners).

Categories