Ethical Issues Raised by Data Mining Essay -- Databases Technology Com

Ethical Issues Raised by Data Mining Data mining is the practice of gathering data from various sources and manipulating it to provide richer information than any of contributing sources is able to do alone or to produce previously unknown information. Businesses and governments share information that they have collected with the purpose of cross-referencing it to find out more information about the people tracked in their databases. Data mining has many benefits. Stores are able to stock merchandise that better reflects what customers want. When Victoria’s Secret started tracking user purchases they noticed that customers in Miami bought much more white lingerie than customers in other areas. As a result they began stocking more white products instead of uniformly stocking all stores benefiting both the store and the customer[i]. Another benefit is that it allows companies to consolidate data from many different sources so that more time can be spent analyzing data than finding it in the first place. This is useful for companies that have multiple financial systems and spend a lot of time trying to combine data into a more useful format rather than doing the actual analysis of the data. A more dramatic example is that some say that 9/11 could have been prevented if the FBI had better data mining tools to share and combine information from different offices[ii]. In addition to crime prevention and f inancial analysis the medical research community can use these techniques in medical research to identify trends and causes of disease. Along with the numerous benefits data mining also has a downside. Combining data from various sources can result in revealing information people would consider private and woul... ...ade Commision, The Fair Credit Reporting Act (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004) 46. [xiv] Tavani, Herman T., â€Å"Privacy and the Internet† Ethics and Technology Conference, Boston, MA, 5 June 1999. (Boston College Intellectual Property Forum, 2000) http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/st_org/iptf/commentary/ [xv] D1 Consulting, Report on Double Click, 2003, University of Southern California, 7 June 2004 [xvi] Tavani, Herman T., â€Å"Privacy and the Internet† Ethics and Technology Conference, Boston, MA, 5 June 1999. (Boston College Intellectual Property Forum, 2000). [xvii]European Parliament, Official Journal of European Communities, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Brussels, Belgium: 2000) 10. [xviii] Federal Trade Commission, Privacy Online: A Report to Congress (Washington, DC: GPO, 1998) 3.