@emilymbender

From an office support staff view, what makes something a Datum is that someone wants to Collect it as an Attribute of some Thing. And what makes some data Personal Data is that, as part of a large enough collection of discrete Data, that Datum can assist in pinpointing a specific Person out of the population of all Persons.

This is part of how website tracking works. It's also why it's a best practice to only collect data you need.

I used to work as office administrative support for a small, non-technical team at a large tech company, and part of my job was ensuring my team complied with organizational privacy and data retention policies.