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by p_l 2017 days ago
They can see ads. You just can't process their PII for them.

You know, it used to be that ads were targeted by where they were shown, not by who was looking. That's a return to that model.

1 comments

A tracking ID isn't PII, though?
What is or isn't PII, which is a US legal term, is irrelevant.

What matters is if it's Personal Data.

Personal Data is defined by the GDPR as:

"‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person".

I would say a tracking ID falls under "an identification number [or] online identifier"...

Fair point on PII.

But to the rest of your post: I don't think so. I think there an identification number is something like a government-issued ID number.

An online identifier would have to identify you (e.g. my Hacker News username is probably identifiable).

The way I think of it is if someone who isn't authorised to know who I am can look in a system at the number and then go off and correlate that info to find me without further reference to other data in said system.

A database ID doesn't count, because you'd then need to look up something actually identifiable in the system to figure out who I am; neither does an opaque tracking number.

My social security number is identifiable; my email address may be identifiable; if I gave birth in region X to octuplets, then that probably is too.

If it can identify the person and be deanonymised, it is.