Data Mining Privacy Issues

http://www.cis.unisa.edu.au/~ciskw/WahlstromRoddickSarreEstivillCastro&DeVries2007.pdf

I found an interesting article on Data Mining titled "Legal and Technical Issues of Privacy Preservation in Data Mining." While data mining can be very beneficial to an organization, management must be aware of the social and ethical issues surrounding the topic of data mining. Public surveys on personal privacy show a raised level of concern about the use of private information. Organizations need to make sure they use certain personal data ethically and responsibly to protect people's private information. Ethical and legal dilemmas arise when mining is executed over data of personal nature which is collected and analyzed in huge volumes on a regular basis. Both consumers and businesses need to be proactive with protecting this sensitive information. Also, the sharing of corporate data may be cost-efficient and beneficial to an organization in a relationship but allowing full access to a database for mining may have detrimental results. The article provides suggested measures to prevent unauthorized mining such as limited access to data, anonymisation, and auditing.
In addition to the ethical and legal issues, there are also technical issues involved with data mining. Data mining is not 100% accurate. This is because mining applications involve vast amounts of data that come from diverse and possibly external sources. There is also a great likelihood of errors caused by mining over poor quality data. The errors and poor data increase the costs associated with identifying and correcting these inaccuracies. It is important for organizations to be aware of the legal, ethical, and technical issues associated with data mining. These organizations need to know how to implement and utilize data mining software properly in order for it to be a success.