Composite personal information

Composite personal information is non-personal information items that, when combined with certain other non-personal information items, can become personal information. In other words, it is the aggregation or combination of non-personal information that reveals insights into personal lives, characteristics and activities, thus forming personal information. Consider a zip code, gender, and birth year. If you look at each of these separately, it would be hard to say you can link each of them to a specific individual. However, if you look at the three items in combination, you may be able to identify a specific individual, particularly in more sparsely populated geographic locations.