An Investigation Into The Ethical Issue Of Privacy

Privacy is one of the most important rights that citizens should have at all. Citizens must have the right to be free and thus decide with whom, where, when, and how to share their information if they want to. Since privacy forms part of the constitutional rights, it is firmly clear that citizen’s identity or personal information matters, and people do not have to explain or justify themselves (Douglas). Fortunately, privacy right has been a more active topic, and as a result of this, now it is recognized in countries where before it was not. Also, it is critical that citizens protect their privacy because personal data can be used in many ways to take control over people who have lost it.

These extremely large data sets may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations relating to human behavior and interaction. These analysesaffect us on day to day basis positively and negatively and the legality of how this information is collected and the laws that apply may be unclear. Both with or without users' knowledge, consumer personal data is collected from every daily, digital activity; from purchases, web searches, amazon searches, browsing history, and phone use. This data is generated, and then downloaded and stored. [15] Companies can then use this data to create "data sets" or large files of users' data to produce customer profiling. This data can also be used by police, the governmental bodies, scientists, businesses, military, and other industries where occasional breaches of data are expected .[16] Breaches and leaks of personal information including phone calls, credit card information, home address, and personal phone numbers are examples of information that is logged and stored by these corporations while making "data sets". Much of this information is being processed and sold to marketers for the purpose of marketing their products. This information is stored digitally and in some cases, regardless of the security of the information being stored, there are risks of unauthorized parties

Imagine, that you come back from a hard day’s work. You put on your favorite grey sweats with a cozy sweater. Soon after, you get a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows. Then you lean back on the sofa, turn on the television and change the channel to the local news. Breaking news with bright red letters are plastered across the screen. The news anchor goes on explaining that an employee at the local hospital accidentally donated data of patients. This means that patient’s social security numbers, addresses, medical records, and other personal information, were given away without patients’ permission or consent. At that moment you realize that all your personal information is out there for everyone to see and use; and there is nothing you can do about it. The collection of personal information is called data mining, and is collected through large online databases. The real question is that data mining violating our privacy and rights? Why are companies still collecting our personal information without our consent and how can we protect ourselves from breaches? Data mining should be limited in the United States and needs to undergo more appropriate privacy and security policies to protect citizens privacy.

Privacy, a term that is reluctant in today’s modernized society who’s meaning is far from realistic. As the world congruently fosters a new way of living, through technology our lives as we know as our own is far from it. This paper will discuss the use of technology to research ones private information, the advantages and disadvantages of the public access of such information and the laws that promulgate such data.

The topic of this paper is privacy. It will talk about the ethical and legal reasons for maintain privacy. The audience for this paper is high school level teachers in a school with one-to-one devices for every student.

Over the past few years, the development of the Internet and the intrusive surveillance capabilities of these technologies have caused privacy to become a major political and social issue for millions of Americans who go online.  Companies employ a variety of tools to gather marketable information on American citizens.  Most of the use of this information is for personalized advertisement and to create databases of target audiences.  While these activities may appear to be nothing more than annoyances for a majority of Americans, there is the hidden danger of the loss of privacy.

With social media growing there seems to be a lack of privacy. Everyone posts where they are and what they are doing and then everyone that follows reads the post and knows that is happening like they are there in person. In “Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy” by Don Tapscott mentions the author of Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, who said “I’d be totally happy if my personal DNA mapping was published” (Tapscott 118). It is mind blowing how open many people are on social media. By, metaphorically, releasing one’s DNA mapping anyone has complete access to creating a clone. Unless someone has a couple thousand dollars laying around ones DNA mapping is far fetch, however by posting the street one lives on, on a public site is just as bad.

How far is too far when it comes to privacy? In a rapidly developing digital age, the boundaries are constantly expanding as new technology emerges. Data mining is not going away, so the debate on privacy becomes increasingly relevant. The line between what is ethical and unethical quickly become blurred, and certain entities are bound to take advantage of that gray area. Corporations claim they are collecting private data for marketing research to serve more relevant advertising and increase profits. Despite the marketing benefits of digital data collection, it is unethical for corporations to collect private digital data without taking proper measures to protect privacy.

The thing that jumped out the most while reading the article was the invasion of privacy. However, the software installed on the cars to monitor their activity is similar to the software that is installed on company computers to monitor their activity as well. This is done as a means to safeguard the assets to ensure they are being used properly for business purposes. This software is used to improve efficiency of the use of the asset, and protect against risk of the item being used improperly or illegally. The monitoring software acts as an internal control for the equipment use.

“If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?,” asked by Andrew Pole’s colleagues. In today’s day and age of technology, data mining can be easily used to compile huge capacities of data that is validated to calculate patterns of the data from the information such as name, address, date of birth, credit card numbers, and social security numbers that people have submitted to the Internet through purchases, advertising, and profiles everyday. Although data mining seems harmless, it allows companies to gather information to improve the business by making ethical decisions; therefore, this can raise concerns with privacy and security of the person and/or their personal information that

The purpose of this white paper is to analyze ways to address the main issue of how to legally, ethically and successfully profit and gain additional audiences through data mining and collecting information. The company will be referred to as either “the company” or “the firm”

With the increased and widespread use of technologies, interest in data mining has increased rapidly. Companies are now utilized data mining techniques to exam their database looking for trends, relationships, and outcomes to enhance their overall operations and discover new patterns that may allow them to better serve their customers. Data mining provides numerous benefits to businesses, government, society as well as individual persons. However, like many technologies, there are negative things that caused by data mining such as invasion of privacy right. This paper tries to explore the advantages as well as the disadvantages of data mining. In addition, the ethical and global issues regarding the use of data mining

Personal privacy today is a controversial and complex topic, which is influenced by a number of factors. There is an integral role that databases play in this highly debated topic. The fact that many people now carry out their transactions electronically is another important factor. There is also pressure on personal privacy for increased national security around the world to combat terrorism. In addition, personal privacy is even threatened by commercial factors and the Internet.

In recent years, privacy preserving data mining has become a hotspot in data mining. Today, the field of privacy has seen rapid advances in recent years because of the increase in the ability to store data. In particular, recent advances in the data mining field have led to increasing concerns about privacy. However, with the development of technologies, the emerging applications result in an accumulation of abundant personal privacy information, which will easily lead to the violence of personal privacy. Therefore, it is significant to study the privacy preserving data mining methods of new applications. Data mining is the process of extraction of data from a large database. Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) is another name of data mining. One of the most important topics in a research community is Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM). It refers to the area of data mining that seeks to safeguard sensitive information from unsolicited or unsanctioned disclosure. The Success of Privacy Preserving data mining algorithms is measured in terms of its performance, data utility, level of uncertainty or resistance to data mining algorithms. The objective of privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) is to find a way to manipulate the dataset, so that the sensitive message can’t be disclosed in data mining.

Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of data - typically business or market related - also known as "big data") in search of consistent patterns and systematic relationships between variables, and then to validate the findings by applying the detected patterns to new subsets of data. In recent years, with the tremendous development in the internet, data storage and processing technologies, privacy and security has become our major concerns in the field of data mining. Privacy preservation is one of the most important and challenging factor as the sensitive data should not be embarrassed by the adversery.this paper presents wide survey of different privacy preserving techniques and algorithms for privacy preserving data mining and points out the merits and demerits.