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

An increasingly popular business practice, data mining provides for the extraction of information from existing data to identify trends such as consumer purchasing practices and can foster greater efficiency in companies’ marketing efforts. There are corresponding costs associated with data mining, as well. The most difficult issue surrounding data mining is that of individual privacy rights and the costs associated with the potential alteration of ‘traditional’ privacy rights. This paper seeks to review basic definitional information on data mining and provide a strategy for companies’ successful, meaningful and ethical use of data mining as presented for meaningful knowledge generation.