Plain English
PII
Personal details that identify someone.
Short for personally identifiable information: anything that identifies a person on its own or combined with other details, such as a name, address, phone number, account number, or health or payment details. Privacy laws in many places set rules for how you handle it.
Why it matters
Leaving PII out of prompts is the simplest privacy habit there is: the answer is usually just as good, and there’s nothing personal to keep or leak.
At work
Before asking for help with a complaint, a support lead swaps the customer’s name and order number for [NAME] and [ORDER].
Think of it like the details you’d black out before photocopying a form for someone else.
Related terms
Where it appears