Personally identifiable information (PII)
Information that can identify a living individual, either on its own or when combined with other data. In the UK and EU the legal term is personal data, which is broader than many PII definitions and includes identifiers such as online IDs and location data.
Why it matters
Personal data brings legal obligations on lawful basis, transparency, security, retention and individual rights. Mishandling it creates regulatory, contractual and reputational risk, and those risks multiply when personal data is copied into analytics environments or sent to third-party AI services.
Technology leaders need to know where personal data flows, not just where it is stored. Logs, prompts, support transcripts and model training sets frequently contain personal data that nobody intended to collect.
In practice
For example, a UK utility building a complaint-summarisation tool might detect and mask names, account numbers and addresses in call transcripts before they reach the summarisation model, while keeping a secure link so authorised staff can still open the original case.
Where Rodan fits
Rodan designs personal-data handling into AI systems from the start in AI and Decision Systems work. See also AI and data privacy: what every business leader needs to understand.