Does Data Mining breach of privacy ?

What is Data Mining ?

Data mining techniques are used to find patterns in large databases of information. But sometimes these patterns can reveal sensitive information about the data holder or individuals whose information are the subject of the patterns. The notion of privacy-preserving data mining is to identify and disallow such revelations as evident in the kinds of patterns learned using traditional data mining techniques.

Can we accept it ?

Some people believe that data mining itself is ethically neutral. It is important to note that the term data mining has no ethical implications. The term is often associated with the mining of information in relation to peoples' behavior. However, data mining is a statistical method that is applied to a set of information, or a data set. Associating these data sets with people is an extreme narrowing of the types of data that are available in today's technological society.

Social Media & Data Mining.

Big companies are mining the social media site to build dossiers on you. Information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums and other sites is fair game. It is yet another reminder that people need to be aware of what they are posting on social networking sites and to whom they’re connected.

Misuse of information.

Trends obtain through data mining intended to be used for marketing purpose or for some other ethical purposes, may be misused. Unethical businesses or people may used the information obtained through data mining to take advantage of vulnerable people or discriminated against a certain group of people. In addition, data mining technique is not a 100 percent accurate, thus mistakes do happen which can have serious consequence.

As my articles here explain on the dangerous of Data Mining, we eventually can stop it if we control and think about what we do when surfing the web.

Good Day. :)

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