Data Mining

So what is data mining? Data mining is basically advertisers autonomously gathering information about people as they search though the web. The best definition I could find for data mining was actually on wikipedia (not a site I like relying on but how and ever). It defines data mining as "the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery". The main goal of advertisers who use data mining is to create a world thats like that scene in Minority Report where every time tom cruise walks by a shop it recognizes him and offers him products based on his previous purchases. So while this might look like an awesome sci-fi way of shopping it actually requires people giving personal information to unknown sources, not something we'd do happily to some randomer on the street. Anyway the article below (which isn't too long) is a good description of data mining and points out its advantages but also its obvious potential pit falls, enjoy.

http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/buffalo-news/mi_8030/is_20100716/growth-data-mining-threat-privacy/ai_n54461179/