Personal Data

Personal data is any information that may be used, either individually or when combined with other data, to identify a person. For example, a name and address are usually sufficient to identify a person, and so this data pair would be considered personal data. A more subtle example is hobbies and Postal Code obtained from a retail liquor store’s customer database. By themselves, these data items would not be uniquely identifying, but when linked with another database, say, that of an iguana owners club, and add to that the common sense knowledge that iguana make rare pets, it becomes almost certain who patronized the liquor store. In other words, any data that could potentially reveal the identity of a person must be treated as personal data.

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