Informational privacy, data mining, and the Internet

Privacy concerns involving data mining are examined in terms of four questions: (1) What exactly is data mining? (2) How does data mining raise concerns for personal privacy? (3) How do privacy concerns raised by data mining differ from those concerns introduced by 'traditional' information-retrieval techniques in computer databases? (4) How do privacy concerns raised by mining personal data from the Internet differ from those concerns introduced by mining such data from 'data warehouses?' It is argued that the practice of using data-mining techniques, whether on the Internet or in data warehouses, to gain information about persons raises privacy concerns that (a) go beyond concerns introduced in traditional information-retrieval techniques in computer databases and (b) are not covered by present data-protection guidelines and privacy laws. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.