PII? Yes PII! What is it?
Personally Identifiable Information
Noun - defined as:
Any representation of information that can help identify a person through direct or indirect means.
Everytime you hear about a big company getting hacked like equifax, myspace, target, we later hear about class action lawsuits to protect consumers. It all goes back to identity fraud. If a criminal has 99% of your identity information, they can call your bank and act like you to maliciously wire transfer or write checks or whatever.
Amazon has increasingly preventing the sharing of Customer contact information, almost as a way to protect vendors and sellers from themselves.
First it started on the SellerCentral side late 2019, Amazon stopped sending customer names/addresses/phones in their order reports to the sellers.
So imagine you’re selling cheese graters through Amazon and normally take customer names/addresses and send them postcards… Amazon Basically prevents this now.
At the same time they get more strict with their developer partnerships and require that they understand the pii RISK and that the developer is more explicitly responsible.
If you lose Amazon customer data, you are fubar.
This week inside the Vendor dashboard for Dropship orders we now see this message:
Lets break this down.
You must safeguard and delete or overwrite (e.g., with “X’s”) all personally identifiable information of Amazon Customers (including name, address, and any gift message) at the earlier of every 6 months or 10,000 records.
You (the Vendor) must establish a process to delete any customer PII data that you are transferring into your system.
For more information regarding customer data policies please see “VENDOR TERMS AND CONDITIONS” and the “Direct Fulfillment Program Policies Overview”.
Don’t fuck with us, its in our T&C.
The main data points to clear out:
- Customer Name
- Customer Address
- Customer Phone Number
- Gift Messages
You will notice that City/State/Zip are not pii, because you cannot identify a person with only that generic information.
Finding More questions than Answers? Need More Help?
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