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Best Practices in Protecting PII Data Essay example

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Abstract
I have decided to write a research paper on the importance of protecting personally identifiable information (PII) in Information Technology. PII is a critical, but often overlooked skill requirement for IT professionals. The subject of PII data is of vital importance to me since I work with PII data frequently and must be prepared to handle it correctly and ethically, less risk the violation of privacy law. In addition to satisfying the necessary requirements for a research paper, the intention of this paper are to provide:

• A thorough treatment regarding what PII data is and isn’t
• Define the best practices in handling PII data in the field
• Providing case studies and legal references that explore the issues of PII data …show more content…

The reasons for this are varied. One of the major factors that prevent full federal protection is that states have broad ways of defining what is considered personally identifiable information. For instance, take a state like Connecticut: their state laws consider an “account number” as a personal identifier (Wright, 2009). Let’s say a church sponsored a bake sale and someone bought a cupcake from that church. If the church happened to log that sale with a unique number, say, S101, where ‘S” is the first initial of the buyer and the number is a one-up sales number, that church would then fall under the provisions of the Connecticut state law and may be required to protect that customer’s identity. Other states have varying definitions as to what PII is. The most robust PII protections in the country exist in the state of California, making PII a protected right and allowing anyone that interacts with that data to appropriately protect and reasonably notify affected people of any potential security breaches (Wikipedia, n.d.).
There exists many different definitions of PII and its applications and provisions are as vast as there are states in the union. Later, an example of a

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