Data Mining
Where's All My Info?
How much personal information remains private in today's world? Data mining is a huge industry that intrudes in the lives of society by gathering information on individuals legally but without knowledge or consent. As Yu-Chin Lin explains in his article "A New Approach to Generate Patterns from Enterprise Databases" in Notes in Computer Science, data mining is a business that thrives on opportunity, taking advantage where it sees fit, recording online transactions, internet histories, and buying spending habits from retailers. It also acquires bank information such as credit card numbers, mother's maiden name, and social security numbers. Not only do data companies collect sensitive data, but they also collect birthdates, height, eye and hair color, current and former addresses, religion, criminal and arrest records, sexual preference, friends and relatives, medical conditions and more. This data is cross checked several times and entered into databases where it is stored along with millions of other entrants (Lin 371).
Data mining companies, that collect information on individuals, sell the information in such forms as background checks and personal information portfolios. Companies that buy this information the most include banks, insurance companies, law firms, the media, marketers, private investigators, and law enforcement and other government agencies. There are problems with having a large amount of private data on a consumer. The data is not always stored in a secure location and is susceptible to hack and information loss. The data is stored in large amounts with several individuals in a central location; once a hacker is in, he has access to several hundreds of thousands of "pages" of data. These data companies are not listening to anyone but their lawyers on how they should protect and store the data they collect. Data mining is becoming a large business and has the potential to get out of control. The...
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