When you use a grocery store card to get a discount on your shopping, the store will be collecting
your personal shopping history. When you complete your taxes, your personal financial details get stored in
a vast data base of the tax-paying citizenry. When you use a charge card, your purchases and payment history
are recorded for purposes of rating your credit.
There have been occasions when such data bases have been used in ways that some would say infringed on
rights of privacy. For instance, supposedly confidential census records were used by the US government during
WWII to locate Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps.
Data mining has also permitted governments and organizations to associate personal information from
a variety of sources in order to learn more about individuals. Many companies, and even governments, make
available for use or for sale various data bases. Such secondary use of data has a commercial value, because
companies can refine their profiles of individuals and tailor marketing to them. The government can use data
mining to identify people who probably have underreported their taxes, or who apparently have links to terrorist
organizations.
It??™s also true that information technology has been used to collect information from sources we usually consider
private.
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