Privacy and Security Issues in Data Mining

Introduction
There are various kinds of definitions about what data mining is. The authors in [1] define data mining as “the process of extracting previously unknown information from (usually large quantities of) data, which can, in the right context, lead to knowledge”. Data mining is widely used in areas such as business analysis, bioinformatics analysis, medical analysis, etc. Data mining techniques bring us a lot of benefits. Business companies can use data mining tools to search potential customers and increase their profits; medical diagnosis can use data mining to predict potential disease. Although the term “data mining” itself is neutral and has no ethical implications, it is often related to the analysis of information associated with individuals. “The ethical dilemmas arise when data mining is executed over the data of an individual” [2]. For example, using a user’s data to do data mining and classifying the user into some group may result in a variety of ethical issues. In this paper, we deal with two kinds of ethical issues caused by data mining techniques: informational privacy issues in web-data mining and database security issues in data mining. We also look at these ethical issues in a societal level and a global level.
Informational Privacy Issues in Web-data Mining
There is a debate between the benefits and potential informational privacy issues in web-data mining. There are large amount of valuable data on the web, and those data can be retrieved easily by using search engine. When web-data mining techniques are applied on these data, we can get a large number of benefits. Web-data mining techniques are appealing to business companies for several reasons [1]. For example, if a company wants to expand its bu...

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