Sprague & Ciocchetti Paper on Protecting Personal Identifying Information

Robert Sprague and Corey Ciocchetti have written Preserving Identities: Protecting Personal Identifying Information through Enhanced Privacy Policies and Laws, 19 Albany Law Journal of Science & Technology.  Here's the abstract:

This article explores the developing phenomenon of the ongoing collection and dissemination of personal identifying information (PII): first, explaining the nature and form of PII, including the consequences of its collection; second, exploring one of the greatest threats associated with data collection - unauthorized disclosure due to data breaches, including an overview of state and federal legislative reactions to the threats of data breaches and identity theft; third, discussing common law and constitutional privacy protections regarding the collection of personal information, revealing that United States privacy laws provide very little protection to individuals; and fourth, examining current practices by online commercial enterprises regarding privacy policy disclosure and conduct. This section reveals that there is almost no legal regulation of online privacy policies. This paper concludes that new, stronger laws are required to protect individuals regarding the collection and dissemination of their PII. A model law is therefore proposed to address those areas where PII protection is lacking.

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As a step further from the notion of "PII" as something distinct from non-"PII", you may be interested in Paul Ohm's forthcoming (2010) paper, "Broken Promises of Privacy," which discusses the failure of the concepts of "PII" and "anonymization." http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 Essentially, with a little bit of work, almost *all* information is personally identifiable information. Thus, exisiting privacy laws, even were they enforced to the hilt, are far too weak.