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high-risk group for lung cancer may be identified earlier and treated, or people not
interested in cars will no longer receive direct mail about them.
Profiling, regardless of whether individuals or groups are profiled, may be more
useful than no profiling at all. Without any profiling or selection, the efficiency or
'hit ratio' is usually poor. For instance, advertising using inadequately defined
target groups, such as on television, is less efficient than advertising only to
interested and potentially interested customers.
1.3 Discrimination, Privacy and Other Issues
Despite all the opportunities described in the previous section, there are also
concerns about the use of data mining and profiling. This topic deals with the
effects of data mining and profiling. By effects, we refer to a neutral term of what
the use of these tools may result in. These effects can be positive (or at least
positive to some people), as illustrated in the previous section and will be
illustrated in Part III of this topic. However, these effects can also be negative (or
at least negative to some people). This topic will deal with two major potentially
negative effects of data mining and profiling, namely discrimination and privacy
invasions. That is not to say that these are the only possible negative effects. Other
negative effects, such as de-individualization, 26 possible loss of autonomy, one-
sided supply of information, stigmatization and confrontation with unwanted
information may be other examples of possible negative effects. 27 However, this
topic will focus on discrimination and privacy issues regarding data mining and
profiling, since most progress has been made in the development of
discrimination-aware and privacy preserving data mining techniques.
Furthermore, even though discrimination and privacy may sometimes be difficult
notions in law and ethics, they are still easier to grasp than notions like de-
individualization and stigmatization, for which there hardly any legal concepts.
For instance, most countries have laws regarding equal treatment (non-
discrimination) and privacy, but laws against de-individualization or
stigmatization are unknown to us.
1.3.1 Any News?
A New Topic
Over the last years, many topics and papers have been written on the possible
effects of data mining and profiling. 28 What does this topic to add to all this
knowledge already available? First of all, most of these topics focus on privacy
issues, whereas this topic explicitly takes discrimination issues into account.
Second, we tried to include more technological background in this topic, in a way
that should be understandable to readers with a non-technical background. Third,
26 Vedder, A.H. (1999).
27 Custers, B.H.M. (2004), p. 77.
28 Hildebrandt, M. and Gutwirth, S. (2008); Harcourt, B.E. (2007); Schauer, F. (2003);
Zarsky, T. (2003); Custers, B.H.M. (2004).
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