Ethical Issues Raised by Data Mining Data mining is the practice of collecting data from various sources and manipulating it to provide richer information than any contributing source is capable of alone or to previously produce unknown information. Companies and governments share the information they have collected with the aim of comparing it to find more information about the people tracked in their databases. Data mining has many advantages. Stores are able to stock merchandise that best reflects what customers want. When Victoria's Secret began tracking user purchases, it noticed that customers in Miami were purchasing significantly more white lingerie than customers in other areas. As a result, they started stocking more white products instead of evenly stocking all stores, benefiting both the store and the customer[i]. Another benefit is that it allows companies to consolidate data from many different sources so they can spend more time analyzing the data rather than researching it initially. This is useful for companies that have multiple financial systems and spend a lot of time trying to combine data into a more useful format rather than performing actual data analysis. A more dramatic example is that some argue that 9/11 could have been avoided if the FBI had better data mining tools to share and combine information from different bureaus[ii]. In addition to crime prevention and financial analysis, the medical research community can use these techniques in medical research to identify disease trends and causes. In addition to its many advantages, data mining also has a disadvantage. Combining data from various sources can lead to revealing information that people would consider private and we would...... middle of paper ......ade Commission, The Fair Credit Reporting Act (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004) 46. [xiv] Tavani, Herman T., “Privacy and the Internet” Ethics and Technology Conference, Boston, MA, June 5, 1999. (Boston College Intellectual Property Forum, 2000) http://www.bc.edu /bc_org/avp /law/st_org/iptf/commentary/[xv] D1 Consulting, Report on Double Click, 2003, University of Southern California, June 7, 2004 [xvi] Tavani, Herman T., “Privacy and the Internet” Ethics and Technology Conference, Boston, MA, 5 June 1999. (Boston College Intellectual Property Forum, 2000).[xvii]European Parliament, Official Journal of the European Communities, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Brussels, Belgium: 2000) 10 .[xviii] Federal Trade Commission, Online Privacy: A Report to Congress (Washington, DC: GPO, 1998) 3.