Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information is any information related to an identifiable person.
Not all are equivalent, and for legal purposes the effective definitions vary depending on the jurisdiction and the purposes for which the term is being used. Under European and other data protection regimes, which centre primarily around the General Data Protection Regulation , the term “personal data” is significantly broader, and determines the scope of the regulatory regime.
As a response to these threats, many website privacy policies specifically address the gathering of PII, and lawmakers such as the European Parliament have enacted a series of legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation to limit the distribution and accessibility of PII.
In broader data protection regimes such as the GDPR, personal data is defined in a non-prescriptive principles-based way.
