PII Compliance

The problems created by not maintaining PII compliance is more than negative publicity. The fines have been massive, for example the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) fined Facebook $5 billion in 2012, Equifax was fined at least $575 million in 2017 and 2019, and British Airways was fined $230 million in 2018. There’s a long list of regulations including: GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS.

It’s not just the big brands that get caught, a PII audit can happen to any business. They are not scheduled, and can be triggered by a complaint that can come from an unhappy ex-customer or even a competitor. There are fines and possible incarceration for not reporting PII breaches as well.

PII can be a person's name, in combination with any of the following information:

• Mother's maiden name

• Driver's license number

• Bank account information

• Credit card information

• Relatives' names

• Home Postal address

• Personal E-mail address

• Home or cellular telephone number

• Personal characteristics / biometric data

• Social Security Number (SSN)

• Date or place of birth

• An individual's title

• Work telephone number

• Official work location/address

• Work email address

• Asset information, such as a car’s Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) or title number. Even MAC (Machine Address Code) or IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity)

• Even a vCon record given voice finger-printing

• Other information that would make the individual's personal identity easily traceable

Across all the conversations a business has, both internally and externally, which are often recorded for training purposes or by company policy, there is a significant repository of customer data missed by most PII tools because they tend to focus on text based files.

Existing PII tools search the company’s storage for files containing customer data, e.g. usernames and password. vCon makes conversation data more easily available to the existing PII audit tools, so your business is better protected. Note, some PII audits are now warning of the emerging need of including audiovisual data for PII Compliance.

Through the open standard vCon the existing PII Compliance tools can be extended to files containing audio visual conversations that are often overlooked. A business is not trapped into multiple specialized PII audits across its different communication silos.