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

Ethical Issues Raised by selective information Mining Data mining is the practice of gathering data from various(a) sources and manipulating it to provide richer information than any of contributing sources is able to do but or to produce previously unknown information. Businesses and governments sh atomic number 18 information that they retain collected with the purpose of cross-referencing it to find out to a greater extent information about(predicate) the people tracked in their databases. Data mining has many benefits. Stores are able to stock merchandise that better reflects what customers want. When Victorias unfathomed started tracking user purchases they noticed that customers in Miami bought much to a greater extent(prenominal) livid lingerie than customers in other areas. As a result they began stocking to a greater extent white products instead of uniformly stocking all stores benefiting both the store and the customeri. another(prenominal) benefit is that it allows companies to consolidate data from many variant sources so that more time can be spent analyzing data than finding it in the first place. This is useful for companies that stool 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 officesii. In addition to crime prevention and financial analysis the medical exam search 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 show information people would consider private and woul... ...ade Commision, The Fair Credit reportage Act (Washington, DC GPO, 2004) 46.xiv Tavani, Herman T., Privacy and the Interne t 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, musical composition on range of a function Click, 2003, University of Southern California, 7 June 2004 xvi Tavani, Herman T., Privacy and the Internet Ethics and Technology Conference, Boston, MA, 5 June 1999. (Boston College Intellectual Property Forum, 2000). xviiEuropean Parliament, Official Journal of European Communities, Charter of primeval Rights of the European Union (Brussels, Belgium 2000) 10. xviii Federal Trade Commission, Privacy Online A Report to Congress (Washington, DC GPO, 1998) 3.