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Essay on Data Mining Benefits and Drawbacks

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Data Mining Benefits and Drawbacks Introduction In a world where computers are becoming as essential to daily life as the cars we drive or the telephones we use to communicate, it is difficult to find a person who doesn’t have some particular use for computers. Computers have become the information stores of the world. If you take a moment to think about all the kinds of information a person can and does hold on their computer it is staggering. I myself have all the passwords to my email and bank accounts, the history of every web page I’ve visited in the last 3 weeks, my credit card numbers, the complete history of all my banking transactions for the last three years stored on my computer. Additionally, think about all the …show more content…

“A number of healthcare advocacy, provider and consumer groups fear changes to new medical privacy rules could give a "green light" to banks and other financial institutions to access sensitive, personal medical information.”3 Consider for a moment the impact of a bank denying a person a loan because they are considered to be “not healthy” enough. Let’s say the person is getting over a drug addiction or has a history of smoking, the bank just might deny the loan based the on belief that the person will use the money to either buy drugs or the person will simply die too early to be able to pay off the loan. It seems far fetched, but is it really? The Dark Side of Data Mining The seemingly innocuous practice of data mining has a less reputable and more aggressive side to it. Some people and companies “mine” for data by subtly installing applications on users systems to monitor their activity. These applications are know as spyware and they range from simple pop-up advertisements to viruses which search out, record, and report back vital information such as passwords, email addresses, and account numbers. “Spyware is embedded in many programs without the knowledge of users. It is used to monitor the activities of computer users and report them to the spyware publisher.”4 In most cases “personal data is collected and distributed for re-sale to marketing enterprises… many of the programs are hidden as downloads on computer games for children.”5

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