Documentation / Platform glossary / Personally Identifiable Information
Personally identifiable information is any data that can identify a specific individual, either on its own or when combined with other available information. The second half of that definition does most of the work: fields that look anonymous in isolation frequently identify someone once joined together.
PII divides usefully into two kinds. Direct identifiers — name, national identification number, email address, biometric data — identify a person by themselves. Indirect identifiers — job title, postal code, hire date, salary band — identify a person only in combination. A department, a start date, and a city can single out one employee in a mid-sized organization.
This combinatorial property is why the category cannot be managed as a fixed field list. Re-identification risk depends on the size of the population the record sits in, not on the field name.
Terminology also varies by regime, and the differences are substantive. GDPR uses personal data, defined more broadly than the US notion of PII to include online identifiers and pseudonymized data. CCPA/CPRA uses personal information and adds a sensitive subcategory. Some regimes recognize special category data — health, ethnicity, union membership, biometrics — where processing conditions are stricter. Workforce systems tend to hold several of these at once.
PII determines which obligations attach to a dataset: consent basis, retention limits, individual access and deletion rights, breach notification, and cross-border transfer restrictions. Misclassifying a field as non-personal removes it from all of that.
The practical control is minimization. Data never collected cannot be breached, mishandled, or subject to a rights request — and reducing collection is usually cheaper than protecting what was collected unnecessarily.
QueryTek applies data minimization to workforce and candidate information, collecting what a workflow requires rather than what a source system happens to expose. Access is scoped to the tenant, and retention is bounded and documented. Field-level handling detail is provided through direct engagement.
