The Ethical Concerns with Data Mining Essay example -- Computers

The Ethical Concerns with Data Mining Introduction to Data Mining and Warehousing With the advent of computer technologies that can store large quantities of data, cross reference that data, and compute patterns in the data, benefits abound in many applications. However, with it comes new ethical concerns regarding the privacy and security of the persons or entities in which the information was sourced. While permission may have been received with each bit of information, which may have appeared harmless to divulge, there are issues regarding the data's ownership -- its sharability in US or globally, its combination with other data, its accuracy, its security, and its overall end use [1] -- that could contribute to privacy or security "violations", where some kind of detremental harm could potentially be presented. Many questions exist. Should there be restrictions on what data can be stored? Should permission be required to be up front? How can the data collected be shared? Should there be a mandated set of rules on data collection and use in general for all businesses, governments, to uphold if they want to use data? What are the ethical evaluations of the issues, and would it be correct for a policy to be put in place to monitor the ethical issues? In this paper I will address how some organizations are dealing with the ethical approaches, but first, here is some background on the technology, its uses, benefits, misuses, and issues. What is Data Mining? What are its Uses? Data Mining, Data Warehousing, or Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(KDDM), are technologies that encorporate computer hardware and software to store large amounts of collected data, usually about people, and then use the infor... .../30/2004 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/03/30/international0553EST0481.DTL 16. ACLU, "Group Calls for Investigation, New Laws to Restrict Data Surveillance", May 27, 2004, http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=15860&c=130 17. Leslie Miller, "EU, U.S. Sign Passenger Data Agreement", Associated Press, May 28, 2004, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=4&u=/ap/20040528/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/airline_passenger_data 18. Amanda Holt, PR Ethics Resource Center 18. Amanda Holt, PR Ethics Resource Center 19. Utilitarian Ethics, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarian_ethics 20. Colleen McCue, Emily S. Stone, Teresa P. Gooch, "Data mining and value-added analysis", The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Nov, 2003. http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2194/is_11_72/ai_111496582