Explain Privacy, Security, and Social Impacts of Data Mining.
Privacy, Security, and Social Impacts of Data Mining
With more and more information accessible in electronic forms and available on the Web, and with increasingly powerful data mining tools being developed and put into use, there are increasing concerns that data mining may pose a threat to our privacy and data security. However, it is important to note that many data mining applications do not even touch personal data. Prominent examples include applications involving natural resources, the prediction of floods and droughts, meteorology, astronomy, geography, geology, biology, and other scientific and engineering data. Furthermore, most studies in data mining research focus on the development of scalable algorithms and do not involve personal data.
The focus of data mining technology is on the discovery of general or statistically significant patterns, not on specific information regarding individuals. In this sense, we believe that the real privacy concerns are with unconstrained access to individual records, especially access to privacy-sensitive information such as credit card transaction records, health-care records, personal financial records, biological traits, criminal/justice investigations, and ethnicity. For the data mining applications that do involve personal data, in many cases, simple methods such as removing sensitive IDs from data may protect the privacy of most individuals. Nevertheless, privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information is collected and stored in digital form, and data mining programs are able to access such data, even during data preparation.
Improper or nonexistent disclosure control can be the root cause of privacy issues. To handle such concerns, numerous data security-enhancing techniques have been developed. In addition, there has been a great deal of recent effort on developing privacy-preserving data mining methods. In this section, we look at some of the advances in protecting the privacy and data security in data mining.
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