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I've gained a tremendous amount of respect for PII while selling software to banks. My position on this type of data is that I am simply a temporary custodian
by bob1029 3y ago
I've gained a tremendous amount of respect for PII while selling software to banks.
My position on this type of data is that I am simply a temporary custodian over it. The identifiable person owns this information. I recognize it as pure liability for us. All downside in our business models.
We go out of our way to keep this stuff out of our systems. We spent the better part of a month talking about various architectures that would "keep the mess over there" (aka inside the bank's 'secure' environment).
The closest we get to liability is storing salted & hashed PII so that we can correlate business keys within sessions. If we find a piece of PII actually makes it through our layers of redaction, it is treated similar to production going down. Our entire team is trained to respond to a PII incident as if it were a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant.
- ptmcc 3y agoThis is the path to enlightenment. The best way to protect PII is to ruthlessly minimize it in your system. Better for compliance and better for customer security. And get to avoid whole sections of scrutiny and review when infosec comes knocking.
- happytiger 3y agoAs someone who’s dealt with vast troves of PII, you clearly speak from deep experience.
- jjav 3y ago> The best way to protect PII is to ruthlessly minimize it in your system. Absolutely, been trying to preach this for ~10 years now at various companies. Another argument to make is that I can guarantee 100% certainty against leaks with a budget of $0, for all the data columns that I never had. Such a deal! Any other choice is going to cost a lot more and have reduced chance of success. Sure, we need to handle some sensitive data to run the business but choose selectively, since every one just adds both cost and risk.