INFORMATIVE HUB: Data mining tells government and business a lot about you
Think you’re losing your privacy to the government? Well… You’re right!
WASHINGTON - You may never have heard the term "data mining," but it's at the core of the argument that's raging over government eavesdropping on Americans. It's also how commercial companies learn about who you are, where you go, what you eat, what you like, what you buy.
Data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that's buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.
"A lot can be learned about a person through the combination of massive amounts of data and the use of sophisticated analytical techniques," said Daniel Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University in Washington.
Whenever you search for information or a product on the Internet, say on Google or Yahoo, you leave a trace.
"Every single search you've ever conducted - ever - is stored on a database somewhere," said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York. "There's probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we've made."
Once it's been collected, the data harvest is stored, organized, searched and analyzed by complex computer programs called algorithms.
The programs scour the data for hidden patterns or relationships, such as a suspicious number of insurance claims by an individual or repeated phone calls between, for example, Afghanistan and Detroit.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will open hearings Monday on the Bush administration's use of wiretaps to monitor such calls without a court warrant.
Data mining turns up such potentially meaningful patterns as, say, Person A telephoned B, who e-mailed C, who met with D and E, who rented an apartment together in F-town. Someone at that apartment made a phone call to someone in Country G in the Middle East. Human investigators can take it from there.
Data miners are like gold or diamond miners, who have to burrow through tons of useless material to get the nuggets they want. They couldn't do it without modern computing systems.
"Human analysts with no special tools can no longer make sense of enormous volumes of data," says an advertisement from Megaputer Intelligence Inc., a data-mining firm in Bloomington, Ind. "Data mining automates the process of finding relationships and patterns in raw data."
Continued...
WASHINGTON - You may never have heard the term "data mining," but it's at the core of the argument that's raging over government eavesdropping on Americans. It's also how commercial companies learn about who you are, where you go, what you eat, what you like, what you buy.
Data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that's buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.
"A lot can be learned about a person through the combination of massive amounts of data and the use of sophisticated analytical techniques," said Daniel Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University in Washington.
Whenever you search for information or a product on the Internet, say on Google or Yahoo, you leave a trace.
"Every single search you've ever conducted - ever - is stored on a database somewhere," said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York. "There's probably nothing more embarrassing than the searches we've made."
Once it's been collected, the data harvest is stored, organized, searched and analyzed by complex computer programs called algorithms.
The programs scour the data for hidden patterns or relationships, such as a suspicious number of insurance claims by an individual or repeated phone calls between, for example, Afghanistan and Detroit.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will open hearings Monday on the Bush administration's use of wiretaps to monitor such calls without a court warrant.
Data mining turns up such potentially meaningful patterns as, say, Person A telephoned B, who e-mailed C, who met with D and E, who rented an apartment together in F-town. Someone at that apartment made a phone call to someone in Country G in the Middle East. Human investigators can take it from there.
Data miners are like gold or diamond miners, who have to burrow through tons of useless material to get the nuggets they want. They couldn't do it without modern computing systems.
"Human analysts with no special tools can no longer make sense of enormous volumes of data," says an advertisement from Megaputer Intelligence Inc., a data-mining firm in Bloomington, Ind. "Data mining automates the process of finding relationships and patterns in raw data."
Continued...
posted by Anonymous | 2/02/2006 09:57:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home