A Composite Strategy for the Legal and Ethical Use of Data Mining

An increasingly popular business practice, data mining provides for the extractionof information from existing data to identify trends such as consumerpurchasing practices and can foster greater efficiency in companies’ marketingefforts. There are corresponding costs associated with data mining, aswell. The most difficult issue surrounding data mining is that of individualprivacy rights and the costs associated with the potential alteration of ‘traditional’privacy rights. This paper seeks to review basic definitional informationon data mining and provide a strategy for companies’ successful, meaningfuland ethical use of data mining as presented for meaningful knowledgegeneration.