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Data Warehousing and Data Mining

notes 2.12 analysis of ethical issues

After looking at different views about data mining, one can see that data mining provides
tremendous benefit to businesses, governments, and society. Data mining is also beneficial
to individual persons, however, this benefit is minor compared to the benefits obtain for the
companies. In addition, in order to gain this benefit, individual persons have to give up a lot of
their privacy right.
If we choose to support data mining, then it would be unfair to the consumers because their
right of privacy may be violated. Currently, business organizations do not have sufficient
security systems to protect the personal information that they obtained through data mining
from unauthorized access. Utilitarian, however, would supported this view because according
to them, “An action is right from ethical point of view, if and only if, the sum total of utilities
produced by that act is greater than the sum total of utilities produced by any other act the agent
could have performed in its place.” From the utilitarian view, data mining is a good thing because
it enables corporations to minimize risk and increases profit; helps the government strengthen
the security system; and benefit the society by speeding up the technological advancement. The
only downside to data mining is the invasion of personal privacy and the risk of having people
misuse the data. Based on this theory, since the majority of the party involves benefit from data
mining, then the use of data mining is morally right.

If we choose to restrict data mining, then it would be unfair to the businesses and the government
that use data mining in an ethical way. Restricting data mining would affect businesses’ profits,
national security, and may cause a delay in the discovery of new medications, biological agents,
or gene therapy that would cure deadly diseases such as cancers or AIDS. Kant’s categorical
imperative, however, would supported this view because according to him “An action is morally
right for a person if, and only if, in performing the action, the person does not use others merely
as a means for advancing his or her own interests, but also both respects and develops their
capacity to choose freely for themselves.” From Kant’s view, the use of data mining is unethical
because the corporation and the government to some extent used data mining to advance their
own interests without regard for people’s privacy. With so many web sites being hack and private
information being stolen, the benefit obtained through data mining is not good enough to justify
the risk of privacy invasion.
As people collect and centralize data to a specific location, there always existed a chance that
these data may be hacked by someone sooner or later. Businesses always promise they would
treat the data with great care and guarantee the information will be save. But time after time, they
have failed to keep their promise. So until companies able to develop better security system to
safeguard consumer data against unauthorized access, the use of data mining should be restricted
because there is no benefit that can outweigh the safety and wellbeing of any human being.

Task Do you think data mining provide help in marketing and research? Discuss
with an example.

2.13 global issues of Data Mining

Since we are living in an Internet era, data mining will not only affect the US, instead it will
have a global impact. Through Internet, a person living in Japan or Russia may have access
to the personal information about someone living in California. In recent years, several major
international hackers have break into US companies stealing hundred of credit card numbers.
These hackers have used the information that they obtained through hacking for credit card
fraud, black mailing purpose, or selling credit card information to other people. According to the

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