↑ Illegal and unethical mining

There where money can be made … Another area of concern is the possible (likely) illegal and unethical use of data mining applications in several industries.

• Patient information is required by law to be gathered only with complete consent by each individual patient. And such information can only be accessed or used by analytics and/or research companies after many levels of security checks. In Europe, it requires “legitimate interest”.

Despite regulations on paper and agreements, some insurance companies, and marketers in general, might perform unethical mining of data without any consent or approval and some may even buy information on the black market and perform illegal mining, in order to discover a new product that might fetch high revenue.

The solution to these ethical concerns regarding the existence of such gold diggers is for businesses to minimally maintain high transparency and being (held) accountable for any breaches of privacy.