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Individually Identifiable Data

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Personally identifiable data; Personal data

Definition

Individually Identifiable Data is data that identifies the person that the data is about, or that can be used to identify that individual. This generally refers to data that contains either an identification number, or factors relating to physical, mental, economic, cultural, or social identity that could be used to link the data to an individual. Regulatory requirements for privacy generally apply (only) to individually identifiable data.

Key Points

Individually Identifiable Data is a legal term (e.g., personal data in the EU Privacy Directive [1], or Individually identifiable health information in U.S. Healthcare Laws [2]); in general privacy laws only protect individually identifiable data. Unfortunately, it is not clearly defined in technical terms. Anonymous data is presumably not individually identifiable, but what about k-anonymous data? (Presumably data is individually identifiable if K = 1, but at what level of K...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995. The protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Off. J. Eur. Communities, 1(281):31–50, 1995.

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  2. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights. Standard for privacy of individually identifiable health information. Technical report, August 2003.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Chris Clifton

Authors
  1. Chris Clifton
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Clifton, C. (2009). Individually Identifiable Data. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1390

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