Episode 0186: Visibility Transparency Observability

Okay, PII, personally identifying information.

I used to say personally identifiable, but I guess it's identifying.

That makes more sense.

PII, it's what you talk about when your driver's license, your address, your phone number, and more.

All those pieces of information.

Credit card data, purchases, everything that can point back to you and... can be connected to each other when you have multiple sources of PII that kind of intersect on you.

So if I just had credit card purchase records without your name attached to them, but I knew a shipping address for products purchased, and I could correlate it against your driver's license information, your residential address, that would be a part of that record.

then I can make some assumptions about purchase activities, regardless of how careful you may have been to not have your name associated.

Anyway, so PII, personal data, there's a personal information, personally identifying information section in that page, but the whole thing is interesting.

Good start.

Pseudonymous, it's based on the word pseudonym.

Pseudonymous is where you are kind of anonymous.

So there's a, just like I just described with the credit card purchases, there's no connection between, in a pseudonymous scenario, there's no connection between your name, your person, like your real name and your real identity, and the identity used for, say, blockchain transactions if you're spending cryptocurrency for something.

So there's no obvious link between the two.

But are you truly anonymous in your purchases? Not really.

So there are various ways to track down who you really are.

It's not as easy as having your name and address attached to everything, but...

but you're not truly anonymous on those scenarios.

So pseudo-anonymous.

I think I'm saying that correctly.

Pseudo-anonymous for the win.

And then our three terms in our title, visibility, transparency, observability.

Visibility... there's not really a good Wikipedia page for it.

So I used visual perception.

So it's sort of about visibility, but visibility really is sort of that it's what you can actually see, uh, literally, or what you can be told, uh, what can be described.