Data Mining: Harnessing the Power of Data in the Digital Age - Essay Sample

Introduction

The world is overwhelmed with many types of data, and manual analysis or classification of the data is impossible due to the increased data in this era of networking and sharing information. Data mining from huge databases has been identified by various researchers as an important research topic in data systems and firms. Data mining is used by firms to generate revenues. There are many emerging applications like online services over the internet that use various data mining methods to understand the use of behavior for improvement of the service offered and to enhance business opportunities. The development of information technology has led to a generation of significant data in many research fields. Currently, data mining is a modern and powerful ICT tool that automatizes the procedure of determining relations and patterns in new information to be used in future decision making. Data mining emerged to implement information extraction algorithms from substantial data collections. Models learned via data mining results help companies to make the right decisions at a short time. Using data mining enables firms to improve profitability, timely discover fraud and increase the risk management events. Many individuals do not trust technology and data mining because their information can be extracted from their social media accounts without their knowledge. Data mining is mostly used during political activities.

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Data Mining

Data mining is no longer a task that has to be done by having people fill out surveys to retrieve their information or interest. If anyone goes to any website, companies are pulling the information the users put into them or store in them to track the consumer's searches, purchases, log ins and more. It has become so second nature that most people do not think twice about the "terms and conditions" when downloading an application to their phones, searching information on the internet and previous purchases if done online. As technology grows so does the demand for more information about consumers likes and dislikes. Society seems to give away their data and access to their privacy without a blink. This essay will explore the origin of data mining, processes of data mining, various types techniques of data mining, and application of data mining in the current society, and explains how privacy can be protected without compromising the efficiency of data mining. In addition, the paper describe how data mining is used in political activities and how this process influences the community.

Data mining has been around for years even before the internet. "Data mining is the computational process of exploring and uncovering patterns in large data sets a.k.a. Big Data", (Li, 2016). "1763 Thomas Bayes' paper is published posthumously regarding a theorem for relating current probability to prior probability called the Bayes' theorem", (Li, 2016). In 1936 technology was starting to boom and it allowed people or companies to process large amounts of data in record time. A company called Decision Science Inc. founded by Lawrence J. Fogel in 1965, which was used to apply programming with data gathering to solve problems. "1975 John Henry Holland wrote Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems, the ground-breaking book on genetic algorithms.", (Li, 2016).

Fast forward to the 1990's when businesses are booming, and technology is advancing more and more into everyday life. Retail stores start using data mining to analyze trends and build marketing based on their consumers. Retail stores are able to take the information gathered and evaluate changes in the financial aspects of their business. As technology has grown so has the need for more information to be store in data mining queries throughout many different websites, applications, stores and other businesses.

There are many different types of data mining techniques. Predictive modeling- this is used to estimate the value of a particular target attribute and there exist sample training data for which values of that attribute are known. (Clifton, 2017). Descriptive modeling also known as clustering divides data into groups. (Clifton, 2017). Pattern mining works by concentrating on identifying rules that describe specific patterns within the data. (Clifton, 2017). Anomaly detection is the opposite of clustering in that it finds data instances that are unusual and do not fit any established pattern. This is something more commonly known or used to detect fraud.

All of these advances with technology and the information that is being put out there comes some serious concerns regarding privacy. Society is dealing with something that has no rules yet. A commercial business could possibly have information saved about certain individuals that pertains to their medical history but that is not something a business such as Netflix needs to know about you. Everything entered into the web even to search is information that is being gathered about people. Every time someone searches something on a website that information is being saved. Amazon and Youtube use this information to make recommendations regarding what people might want to purchase from what they have previous purchased or simply searched. Many people have applications on their phones with their own personal information stored in them.

There is no set standard for a company on how they can gather information and use it. Let's look at Nordstrom which pulled information about customers from their phones each time they would connect to the Wi-Fi. This is something they did without the customers knowledge. This caused some unease for people who are concerned about the privacy we think we have getting cut shorter and shorter. Some might look at this as a nice service the store was offering by allowing them to use their Wi-Fi so that person did not have to use the data, they might get charged from the service provided. As a society people would not think twice about login into the Wi-Fi provided by a store. People would not think that the information they search for or use while logged in would be used by that company. Most people would think the information being set over the Wi-Fi is protected.

Information about individuals is not safe, privacy boundaries are hard to set and see when dealing with technology. It is being used to use even for political gain. Facebook was at the head of a scandal when people found out that people working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign of 2016 were exploiting the information, they had on their personal Facebook accounts. This opened up the eyes for many how data mining can be used in a negative way without any of us knowing or even understanding what's going on. The rules for the privacy on Facebook are lax to say the least. There are constantly fake profiles popping up and then infiltrating people's friends list to gain more and more information to possibly scam you later.

The information Cambridge Analytica acquired through Facebook was used to target people for political ads during the UK Brexit referendum campaign as well as the 2016 election. "The firm combines data from multiple sources, including online information and polling, to build "profiles" of voters", (Sherr, 2018). This a prime example of most people not even thinking about the idea our information is being analyzed in a negative way. Most people think it's nice that Amazon and Netflix make a list of recommendations you might like based of the data that they have collected. Then there are companies like Cambridge Analytica that is using what someone has liked on Facebook to change how the world is ran and who influences it.

The information Cambridge acquired was from an application Aleksandr Kogan created. People would log into the application through their Facebook profiles. The application did ask for access to their account, their friend's data, locations and monitored what they would like through Facebook. Kogan then took the information that was gathered and gave it to Cambridge Analytica. This was a violation of Facebooks privacy policy, however they were aware that it had happened and did not inform their users. Once Facebook was made aware, they instructed Cambridge to dispose of the information. This was something that again was not done and not told to the users until the store broke. This is part of why more and more people have trust issues with technology and data mining.

Privacy policies are not usually written in a way that makes it easy for people not in the IT world to understand. Policies have things written as, "non-personally identifiable information," some policies have even sparked probes by regulators at the Federal Trade Commission.", (Waxer, 2013). Technology has become so second nature to most of the world that we don't even think that it could be used to harm us. Technology is so board that we can't even begin to imagine the blind spots we have or that we will have. Things like data mining continue to grow at a rate we are constantly reacting vs being proactive. "The result is a high-tech Catch-22: On the one hand, consumers want to receive highly targeted and personalized products and services. On the other hand, they don't want to feel as if their personal data is up for commercial grabs." (Waxer, 2013).

There was a consent decree created in 2011 between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), "that Facebook must get users to agree to and must notify them about the social network sharing their data", (Sherr, 2018). This did not happen and thus the scandal. Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook was asked to Washington and spent 10 hours over two days answering questions about how it handles the privacy of its users. He was hammered with questions regarding how Facebook works, how it monitors people using the internet and if people without accounts can still be tracked through "shadow profiles". This is information Facebook gathers about you from other sources.

We as a society can't rely on these applications or social media networks to protect the privacy we so desperately want to cling too. Society as the consumer has to take some responsibility to protect themselves. Technology has had some great advances such as in the medical field but as a society it continues to divide us. Facebook doesn't make people verify the information they are sharing is real and not something to spread hate. Just recently there was a mass shooting recorded via Facebook live and it took too long before it was removed. Some say that social media allows us to be better informed. I think it allows us to be more ignorant of whatever we want. We can spend endless hours scrolling vs engaging with our community.

What is the importance of ethics in data mining in today's world? We live in a time where we go after knowledge which is indispensable. With the advancement in technology we have seen in the past few years we have found out that information is important due to human activity and their pattern of behavior such as purchasing. Some people might also say that 90% of data has been gathered the last two years and as more and more devices connect to the internet generating that data will become a lot easier. With this data companies can predict patterns of purchasing habits and with this information they can use it to increase specific sales. In the article "17 'Internet of Things' Facts Everyone Should Read" published by Forbes in October 2015, brings us an idea of some numbers and the potential market that is available to be exploit:

Nowadays there are more objects connected to the internet than people:

By the year of 2020 around 250.000 vehicles will be connected to the internet, (saving time spend in traffic, fuel, improving the performance and protecting the environment and generating data);

The global wearable device market has grown 223% only in 2015 specially by the launching of Fitbi...