personidentifiserbare

Personidentifiserbar is a Swedish term describing information or data that can be used to identify a natural person. In privacy, data protection, and research ethics, something is considered personidentifiserbar if it can be linked to or reveal the identity of an individual, either directly or indirectly.

Identifiability can be direct or indirect. Direct identifiers include obvious data such as a person’s name, national identification number, or biometric data. Indirect identifiers (quasi-identifiers) are combinations of information that, when linked with other data, could identify someone—for example birth date, postal code, gender, job title, or specific health attributes. Whether data are personidentifiserbare depends on the available information and the possibility of re-identification, not on whether a name is present at the moment.

In legal and regulatory practice, personal data are those information relating to an identified or identifiable person. Even datasets that are not labeled with names may be personal data if reasonable steps or data linkage could reveal who the individual is. Conversely, properly anonymized or aggregated data that cannot reasonably be used to identify a person are typically not considered personidentifiserbare.

Implications include stronger protections, data minimization, access controls, and, in many regimes, explicit consent or legitimate interest assessments. To reduce identifiability, organizations may apply pseudonymization, anonymization, data aggregation, removal of quasi-identifiers, or privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy.