Personal Information
Personal Information is a category of user-account data in Salesforce, covering a user's name, alias, email, phone number, address, and work details such as title and company.
Definition
Personal Information is a category of user-account data in Salesforce, covering a user's name, alias, email, phone number, address, and work details such as title and company. It lives in the user record and in the per-user settings area, where each person can review and update their own details without filing a request with an admin.
The same data also sits at the center of Salesforce privacy controls. Some of these fields are personally identifiable, so Salesforce hides a set of them from external community and portal users by default. Personal Information therefore spans two ideas: the self-service settings a user maintains, and the user attributes that data protection rules govern.
How Personal Information works across settings and privacy
Where Personal Information lives in the UI
Every Salesforce user has a personal settings area for their own account. In Lightning Experience you reach it by clicking your profile avatar at the top of any page, then choosing Settings. The left sidebar has a Quick Find box. Type "Personal Information" and the Personal Information page opens. In Salesforce Classic the same area is called Personal Settings, reached from the name menu in the header. The Personal Information page shows editable fields for name, phone, email, address, and work information like title, company name, and division. Salesforce describes this page as the place to "update your name, phone number, email, address, and work information." Related pages sit alongside it, including Language and Time Zone, email settings, and the password reset page. Each user edits only their own record here. Admins manage everyone else from Setup under Users. One note worth remembering: this personal settings area is not supported on Lightning Experience in iPad Safari, so a desktop browser is the reliable way in.
The fields that count as Personal Information
The user object stores a wide set of attributes, and only some of them are treated as personal. The common self-editable fields are first and last name, alias, email, phone, mobile, fax, street address, title, company, and department. Language, Locale, Time Zone, and Email Encoding sit on a separate Language and Time Zone page but are still part of a user's personal profile. Locale controls how dates, numbers, and currency are formatted. Language sets the text and online help shown to that user. Time Zone drives how Salesforce displays and calculates date-time values for that person. Other user fields are administrative rather than personal. Profile, role, active status, user license, and permission set assignments all describe what the user can do, not who they are. Salesforce does not let users edit those fields about themselves, even on the Personal Information page. That separation matters: a user can fix a typo in their own phone number, but cannot grant themselves a new profile or a different license.
Who can edit what, and how admins control it
Self-service editing is on by default, but admins decide how far it goes. Field-level security on the User object controls whether a given field is visible and editable for a profile or permission set. If you make a field read only there, users see it on their own record but cannot change it. This is how teams lock down fields that carry business meaning, like an employee number or a federation identifier used for single sign-on. Admins also edit personal information on behalf of users from Setup. Open Setup, go to Users, pick the user, and click Edit. This is the path for bulk corrections, for fixing an account when someone is locked out, or for updating details during onboarding. A frequent support question is admins who cannot edit their own user record. That usually traces back to a permission or field-level security gap on their own profile, not a bug. The fix is to confirm the right edit permissions, then reload the record. Keeping a clear policy on which fields are self-service and which are admin-managed prevents drift in important data.
Personal Information as privacy-sensitive data
Because user fields can identify a real person, Salesforce protects a subset of them from external users such as community, portal, and Experience Cloud members. By default, fields like Alias, Email, Employee Number, Federation Identifier, Sender Email, Signature, Username, Division, Title, Department, and Extension are concealed from external users. First and last name are also hidden from external users through a standard field set. The goal is to stop an external visitor from harvesting internal staff details just by viewing a user's profile. This protection arrived as a setting in Winter '22 and became the enforced default for all orgs in Spring '23, replacing an older opt-in "Hide Personal Information" toggle that has since been retired. Internal users with the right access still see these fields normally. Architects should treat user PII the same way they treat any other regulated data: limit who can see it, document why each external-facing field is exposed, and review those choices when a community or portal goes live.
A short worked example
Picture a sales rep, Priya, who just moved from the London office to New York. Her records still show a London phone number and a Europe/London time zone, so meeting times look wrong and a customer dials the old desk line. Priya does not need a ticket for this. She clicks her avatar, chooses Settings, types "Personal Information" in Quick Find, and updates her phone number and address. She then opens Language and Time Zone and switches Time Zone to America/New_York so her calendar and activity timestamps line up. Her admin, meanwhile, has set field-level security so the Employee Number field on the User object is read only for the Sales profile. Priya can see her employee number but cannot change it, which keeps that field accurate for the HR integration that relies on it. When Priya's profile is later viewed in the company's partner community, her username, title, and employee number stay hidden from external partners, because Salesforce conceals those personal fields from external users by default. Self-service, admin control, and privacy protection all act on the same record at once.
Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
The most common mistake is assuming the Personal Information page exposes every user field. It does not. Picklist-driven admin fields like Profile and Role never appear there, so do not promise users they can self-edit those. A second pitfall is forgetting that field-level security, not the page layout alone, decides whether a self-service field is editable. If a user reports they cannot change their own title, check field-level security on the User object before anything else. Time zone and locale cause a surprising number of "wrong time" tickets. A user who sees appointments an hour off almost always has the wrong Time Zone on their personal profile, not a calendar bug. Finally, do not confuse hiding personal information from external users with encrypting it. The default concealment controls visibility for community and portal users; it is not Shield Platform Encryption and does not protect data at rest. Treat the two as separate layers and apply each where it belongs.
How to update your Personal Information
Updating your own Personal Information takes a few clicks in Lightning Experience. This walkthrough covers the standard self-service path plus the related Language and Time Zone page, which holds settings many users forget are part of their personal profile.
- Open your personal settings
Click your profile avatar in the top right of any Salesforce page, then choose Settings. This opens your own settings area, not org-wide Setup.
- Find the Personal Information page
In the left sidebar, type Personal Information in the Quick Find box and click the matching result. The editable form for your account appears.
- Edit and save your details
Update your name, phone, email, address, or work fields as needed, then click Save. Changes apply to your user record immediately.
- Adjust language and time zone
Back in Quick Find, open Language and Time Zone. Set your Time Zone, Locale, and Language, then save so dates, formats, and timestamps match where you work.
Holds name, alias, email, phone, address, title, company, and division for your own account.
Controls Time Zone, Locale, Language, and Email Encoding, which shape how Salesforce displays text, dates, and numbers for you.
Set on the User object per profile or permission set; decides which personal fields a user can actually edit versus only view.
- The Personal Information page never exposes admin fields like Profile, Role, or License, so users cannot self-assign access there.
- If a self-service field will not save, the cause is almost always read-only field-level security on the User object, not the page layout.
- Accessing personal settings is not supported on Lightning Experience in iPad Safari; use a desktop browser instead.
- Admins who cannot edit their own user record usually have a missing edit permission, not a platform bug; check permissions and reload.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Personal Information in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Personal Information.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Personal Information.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What does the Personal Information category in user settings cover?
Q2. Why does Salesforce treat Personal Information as its own distinct category in user settings?
Q3. Who is able to edit a user's Personal Information fields?
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