Personal Information in a Modern, Digital Age
In the past when you wanted to purchase goods you could go to the store, pick up your items, pay and leave. While these activities are still possible, more and more today we find ourselves pressured to get “savers cards.” Modern businesses, like never before, track who you are and what you are burying in an effort to be able to better serve you and become more efficient. While great for the companies implementing these policies, what does it mean for your privacy, and your wallet?
Now more than ever our lives are electronically based. People can access their banking information over the Internet, setup all kinds of funds transfers, as well as purchase and sell items. Our consumer lives are being tracked, and that information sold to other businesses. Business communicate and sell their consumer lists with each other.
Data is one of the most important corporate assets of companies, governments and research institutions. It is now possible to have fast access, to correlate information stored in independent and distant databases, to analyse and visualise data on-line and use data mining tools for automatic and semi-automatic exploration and pattern discovery. (acs)
This opens the door for a new kind of scam for a new age, identity theft. If someone were able to pass themselves off as you, they could effectively become you, for the purposes of getting credit, making large purchases, or even committing crimes.
After collecting this data it is entered into what is called a data warehouse. Companies and governments store all of their accumulated in their data warehouses. Data warehousing is defined as
A collection of data designed to support management decision making. Data warehouses contain a wide variety of data that present a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time. Development of a data warehouse includes development of systems to extract data from operating systems plus installation of a warehouse database system that provides managers flexible access to the data. The term data warehousing generally refers to the combination of many different databases across an entire enterprise. (webopidia)
Today businesses accumulate all the data they can gather into a data warehouse, from which they can do data mining. This means that when you go to the grocery store and use your saver card, to get the tiny percent off, that store tracks what you buy and enters it into their data warehouse.
Privacy does not have a single definition and it is a concept that is not easily defined. Information privacy is an individual's claim to control the terms under which personal information is acquired, disclosed, and used [9]. In the context of privacy, personal information includes any information relating to or traceable to an individual person [ 1]. Privacy can be defined as a fundamental human right; thus, privacy protection which involves the establishment of rules governing the collection and handling of personal data can be seen as a boundary line as how far society can intrude into a person's affairs.
Big Data is changing the arena for big businesses. Big Data is the technology trend that has made it possible for businesses to better understand their markets. Big Data is the new natural resource, the new “oil.”
Thirty one million kids nationwide eat school sponsored meals twice a day for a hundred eighty days and on average for twelve years. In this sense school lunches are an important and critical component of childhood nutrition and development. Yet these meals are highly processed and filled with chemicals and preservatives. School lunch rooms are essentially fast food restaurants; they unload shipments of frozen food then heat it up in glorified microwaves and serve it hot and ready. This is the same basic principle of fast food restaurants and people all know how terribly unhealthy fast food is for them. Still America feeds this toxic material to kids every day. This has been a tremendous issue for years but it is more devastating now than ever before.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years,” meaning that America’s children need to start eating healthier, including healthier school lunches. The National School Lunch Act is a fairly recent addition to American society. For, as the world waged war a second time, the United States began to worry about the strength and health of the country’s soldiers. However, in the beginning, selling excess agricultural goods was more important than building a healthy, well-balanced meal for students. Unfortunately, many children coming from poorer families could not afford well-balanced school lunches, so in order to compensate, the School Lunch Program changed its focus to help these students. This program, however, decreased schools’ lunch budgets, and schools had a hard time keeping up with the amount of free meals they had to provide, so they came up with some extra ways to increase revenue. However, in a small town in Massachusetts, one chef makes a difference in the health of the school lunch students eat each day, and proves that hiring a trained chef to cook real, healthy meals can increase profit. Unfortunately, that is not the case in most schools across the nation. The quality of health of the food being served in school lunches is extremely poor and was allowed to decline even more with a new set of rule changes. However, there are some improvements currently being made to increase the quality of health of the food being served to students, including teaching them all about food and its nutritional information, both good and bad. In order for students to eat healthier lunches at school, the USDA needs to implement healthier ...
This article discusses how important the organisms symbiotic with coral reefs are, as well as how important coral reefs are to our environment. Also explained is how natural and non natural things things like hurricanes and overfishing affects them. A study is quoted about how water acidity also plays a role in the bleaching of corals. Lastly, restoration and conservation efforts are discussed and how we could possibly help our oceans.
About 98.3% of all persons had used e-business services such as Octopus Card and Automatic Teller Machine (Census and Statistics Department, 2009). One of the pitfalls for the development of e-business, however, is the concerns on consumer privacy. According to Green’s (1999) survey, 54% of respondents had decided not to purchase a product because of a concern overuse of personal information collected in the e-business transaction. This essay examines the circumstances on protection of consumer privacy in e-business. As e-business is surging by an astronomical number and consumer information is a kind of property, the protection of consumer privacy in e-business becomes significant.
Data mining has emerged as an important method to discover useful information, hidden patterns or rules from different types of datasets. Association rule mining is one of the dominating data mining technologies. Association rule mining is a process for finding associations or relations between data items or attributes in large datasets. Association rule is one of the most popular techniques and an important research issue in the area of data mining and knowledge discovery for many different purposes such as data analysis, decision support, patterns or correlations discovery on different types of datasets. Association rule mining has been proven to be a successful technique for extracting useful information from large datasets. Various algorithms or models were developed many of which have been applied in various application domains that include telecommunication networks, market analysis, risk management, inventory control and many others
A data warehouse comprised of disparate data sources enables the “single version of truth” through shared data repositories and standards and also provides access to the data that will expand frequency and depth of data analysis. Due to these reasons, data warehouse is the foundation for business intelligence.
Business today is inextricably intertwined with technology, from the smallest home office, to a multinational corporation with multiple monolithic legacy application. It is impossible to be in business today without confronting the issues of technology. The way we do business today is different than 30 years ago. Technology has evolved around the areas of telecommunication, travel, stock market, shipping even around our daily lives. E-commerce a system by which people can buy, sell and deal without even seeing the person on the other side has taken a front seat in improving the economy of countries around the world. Technology today has made it possible for monetary institutions to help locate the customers resources and help solve their problems at any given time through online banking. The Internet, a boon to all business, is playing a part of a catalyst; it links millions of customers to its suppliers and vice versa due to this, manufactures are able to cut the role of middlemen and are able to deal with the customers, giving them the ability for direct input from the customers about their choices and views of their product. The busi...
For the past couple of decades the majority of businesses have wanted to construct a data-driven organization or company. Furthermore, companies around the world are considering harnessing data as a basis of competitive advantage over other companies. As a result, business intelligence and data science use are popular in many organizations today. The increase in adoption of these data systems is in response to the heavy rise in communications abilities the world over. Which, in turn ,has increased the need for data products. Indeed, the Data Scientist profession is emerging to be one of the better-paying professions due to the urgent need of their labor. This paper is going to discuss what business intelligence is all about and explain data science that is usually confused to be similar to business intelligence. I will tackle a brief overview of data scientists and their role in organizations.
Recently, the Internet has become the most significant technology in all over the world, which is not only used by the people to contact with each other but also utilized by the business organizations to become global (Taylor, Caeti, Loper, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2006). Computer and internet enable the business organizations to execute the Electronic commerce business model, which has become very popular. Computers and Internet are a powerful source in the success of globalization and international business. Computers are being used worldwide and due to this, cyber crimes are increasing continuously with a rapid growth (Cheeseman, 2006).
Privacy in Cyberspace Computers and the Internet have changed many things in the world today. People surf the web on a daily basis for information and entertainment. The Internet is making things like paying your bills from home a possibility. This was something that you had to leave the house to do, even if it was just dropping a check in the mail. Now you can pay your bills and buy your groceries, with everything being just a point and a click away.
The dynamics of our society bring many challenges and opportunities to the business world. Within the last decade, hundreds of jobs have emerged particularly in the technology sector to help keep up with the ever-changing world and to compete on a larger and better scale than the competition. Two key job markets and the basis of this research paper are business intelligence or BI and data mining or DM. These two fields play a very important role in small to large companies and are becoming higher desired sectors within the back offices of the workplace. This paper will explore what the meaning of BI and DM really is, how they are used and what we can expect as workers and learners of the technology and business fields for the future.
The last decade can be marked as a period of significant changes in the business world. Being accustomed to utilize computers as a powerful tool with its office applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. In the 1990s office workers first faced the opportunity to share information using the Internet (McNurlin, 2009). However, the situation became even more different with the transition to the third millennium. With a further development of information technologies, the majority of big enterprises had to reconstitute their business processes and to make the transition to the Internet economy. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply-chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) software and the variety of other information systems became essential components of the new economy. It can be expected, that all these complex solutions were designed to bring great benefits for different sides of the corporate activity, in particular, decisions made by top-managers are expected to become nearer to the ideal, customer service is to be improved and collaboration more prolific. Nevertheless, to ensure the desired results it should be taken into account that the key concept of these reorganizations is an information or a data, dealing with which can be a serious issue, and wide utilizing of the data warehouses in contemporary organizations confirms this fact.
Generally, data mining can be associated with classes and concepts. data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is the best analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among the dozen fields in large relational databases.