Privacy server for protecting personally identifiable information

摘要

A privacy server protects private information by substituting a token or an identifier for the private information. The privacy server recognizes that a communication includes private information and intercepts the communication. The privacy server replaces the private information with a random or pseudo-random token or identifier. The privacy server maintains the private information in a local database and associates the private information for a particular person with the token or identifier for that person.

主权项

1. A method of protecting personally identifiable information transmitted in a communication in an educational environment, the method comprising:
receiving the communication from a user's computer system, wherein content of the communication includes a plurality of information fields and the content of the communication includes a spreadsheet, form, template, or web page that includes a name or identifier of a student; determining whether the content of the communication includes an information field directed to personally identifiable information (PII) by determining whether the information in the information field was provided in connection with a predetermined process defined by an application on a remote application server wherein the predetermined process is a registration process, and the user is unaware of the determination whether the content of the communication includes the information directed to personally identifiable information (PII); if the content of the communication does not include any information fields with information provided in connection with the predetermined process, then forwarding the communication; and if at least one of the information fields in the content of the communication includes information provided in connection with the predetermined process, then:
intercepting the communication;extracting information from the at least one information field;creating a PII identifier, wherein the PII identifier is a pseudo-random character string;associating the PII identifier with the extracted information;creating a token by decorating the PII identifier with at least one code;substituting the token for the information in the at least one information field in the content of the communication to create a second communication; andforwarding the second communication to the remote application server.