Best practices and tools for personal information compliance management

Recent incidents involving the loss of personal information and identity theft have raised concerns worldwide over information privacy. In Japan, the Personal Information Protection Act went into effect in April 2005, requiring every enterprise to manage sensitive personal information on servers, workstations, and personal computers throughout the organization. This paper describes two tools we developed to assist in the management of personal information, aDesigner and the Personal Information Detection (PID) tool. The aDesigner tool scans an entire Web site to determine if each HTML page complies with the IBM privacy guidelines for external Web sites. PID is capable of automatically identifying "named entities," such as personal names, addresses, or telephone numbers in the textual parts of target files based on Japanese morphological analysis technology. This paper also summarizes the best practices used in IBM Japan for privacy management and presents statistical results concerning personal information gathered through deployment of these tools. © 2007 IBM.