Why You Should Destroy Your Customers PII and PHI Data
Information is vastly crucial to maintain and secure, and most so when in regards to customer information. There are many different secure ways to withhold information of a customer in a place that is hard to crack and therefore will not be violated, so most people give their private information to businesses with the knowledge that it will be stored safely. However, new reservations from insiders at many businesses have shown that in this day and age of modern technology where information is passed in from web servers and stored in encrypted files, there are certain businesses that hold client information in file cabinets, and other physical office objects. This is worrisome for a number of reasons, the number one reason being that physical objects are not safe from invasive actions, such as breaking and entering and simply grabbing a client’s private information. As a result, here are the top two types of information that customers most usually give to business, and are also in the most danger to a security breach, and therefore must be destroyed after the information is made digital to avoid a breach in personal identity.
PII:
PII or Personally Identifiable Information is a series of different pieces of information that is used to distinguish different people. Such examples of a PII are your name, address, email, phone number, birth date, social security number, bank information, and other personal assets that are used to create your profile in the government. PII is vastly important because the information is crucial to making you an individual and considered a government-citizen, when your PII is breached and other people begin to use those items, you cease to be your own person and are sharing identities with someone else. Criminals can create mass debt or sell your identity, which as you can imagine can cause irreplaceable damage. Due to all the dangers involved in having your PII in physical form and near the hands of criminals, it is detrimental to destroy all records of PII information from customers and place the information in an online encrypted folder to avoid ruining a customer’s life.
PHI:
PHI or Protected/Personal Health Information is the information that involves a medical history, medical tests, laboratory history, mental health conditions and diagnosis, and various other pieces of information that are related to your medical history and conditions. In addition to the medical side of the PHI information, a lot of the information is the same as PII such as your address, social insurance number, banking information, and other identifiable pieces of government information, the difference between the two however is that PII is used to identify citizens of the government, while PHI is mostly connected to the medical history of an individual. The reason why PHI is so important to keep secure is that the medical history is obviously very personal and also has insurance information placed inside to which can be used to build debt against the customer.
Destroying the information:
PII and PHI information is both vastly important and personal pieces of information that must be kept secure at all costs. In order to do so, businesses need to copy all the information onto an encrypted digital folder that is protected from hackers and intruders. After the information has been placed on the internet, all physical copies of the information must be destroyed to avoid a security breach.