---
title: "Data mining"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:56:28.867669+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Privacy concerns and ethics ==
While the term "data mining" itself may have no ethical implications, it is often associated with the mining of information in relation to user behavior (ethical and otherwise).
The ways in which data mining can be used can in some cases and contexts raise questions regarding privacy, legality, and ethics. In particular, data mining government or commercial data sets for national security or law enforcement purposes, such as in the Total Information Awareness Program or in ADVISE, has raised privacy concerns.
Data mining requires data preparation which uncovers information or patterns which compromise confidentiality and privacy obligations. A common way for this to occur is through data aggregation. Data aggregation involves combining data together (possibly from various sources) in a way that facilitates analysis (but that also might make identification of private, individual-level data deducible or otherwise apparent). The threat to an individual's privacy comes into play when the data, once compiled, cause the data miner, or anyone who has access to the newly compiled data set, to be able to identify specific individuals, especially when the data were originally anonymous.
Data may also be modified so as to become anonymous, so that individuals may not readily be identified. However, even "anonymized" data sets can potentially contain enough information to allow identification of individuals, as occurred when journalists were able to find several individuals based on a set of search histories that were inadvertently released by AOL.
The inadvertent revelation of personally identifiable information leading to the provider violates Fair Information Practices.   This indiscretion can cause financial,
emotional, or bodily harm to the indicated individual.  In one instance of privacy violation, the patrons of Walgreens filed a lawsuit against the company in 2011 for selling
prescription information to data mining companies who in turn provided the data
to pharmaceutical companies.

=== Situation in Europe ===
Europe has rather strong privacy laws, and efforts are underway to further strengthen the rights of the consumers. However, the U.S.–E.U. Safe Harbor Principles, developed between 1998 and 2000, currently effectively expose European users to privacy exploitation by U.S. companies. As a consequence of Edward Snowden's global surveillance disclosure, there has been increased discussion to revoke this agreement, as in particular the data will be fully exposed to the National Security Agency, and attempts to reach an agreement with the United States have failed.
In the United Kingdom in particular there have been cases of corporations using data mining as a way to target certain groups of customers forcing them to pay unfairly high prices. These groups tend to be people of lower socio-economic status who are not savvy to the ways they can be exploited in digital market places.

=== Situation in the United States ===
In the United States, privacy concerns have been addressed by the US Congress via the passage of regulatory controls such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The HIPAA requires individuals to give their "informed consent" regarding information they provide and its intended present and future uses. According to an article in Biotech Business Week, "'[i]n practice, HIPAA may not offer any greater protection than the longstanding regulations in the research arena,' says the AAHC. More importantly, the rule's goal of protection through informed consent is approaching a level of incomprehensibility to average individuals." This underscores the necessity for data anonymity in data aggregation and mining practices.
U.S. information privacy legislation such as HIPAA and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) applies only to the specific areas that each such law addresses. The use of data mining by the majority of businesses in the U.S. is not controlled by any legislation.

== Copyright law ==

=== Situation in Europe ===

==== European Union ====
Even if there is no copyright in a dataset, the European Union recognises a Database right, so data mining becomes subject to intellectual property owners' rights that are protected by the Database Directive. Under European copyright database laws, the mining of in-copyright works (such as by web mining) without the permission of the copyright owner is permitted under Articles 3 and 4 of the 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. A specific TDM exception for scientific research is described in article 3, whereas a more general exception described in article 4 only applies if the copyright holder has not opted out.
The European Commission facilitated stakeholder discussion on text and data mining in 2013, under the title of Licences for Europe. The focus on the solution to this legal issue, such as licensing rather than limitations and exceptions, led to representatives of universities, researchers, libraries, civil society groups and open access publishers to leave the stakeholder dialogue in May 2013.

==== United Kingdom ====
On the recommendation of the Hargreaves review, this led to the UK government to amend its copyright law in 2014 to allow content mining as a limitation and exception. The UK was the second country in the world to do so after Japan, which introduced an exception in 2009 for data mining. However, due to the restriction of the Information Society Directive (2001), the UK exception only allows content mining for non-commercial purposes. UK copyright law also does not allow this provision to be overridden by contractual terms and conditions.

==== Switzerland ====
Since 2020, also Switzerland has been regulating data mining by allowing it in the research field under certain conditions laid down by art. 24d of the Swiss Copyright Act. This new article entered into force on 1 April 2020.