Page 53 - the SyI Quarterly 15

With the same capability available to organised crime, you have a wholly different and much more serious
problem. Between the law-abiding organisations and organised crime there is a spectrum of organisations
ranging from slightly aggressive targeted marketing to malicious code authors that install ad-ware on your
machine to replace official adverts with nefarious ones.

The above is one major area of data mining and the one most people think of, but it is not the only one.
Organised crime, terrorist organisations, investigative journalists and private investigators can all use data
sources on the Internet and data mining tools to find and target people and groups.
It is amazing what is now achievable from knowing small snippets of information and using these as keys in
different databases, which give further bits of information, which in turn can be used as search keys in other
databases. This can make it possible to find a lot of information about people including information that
could otherwise be considered confidential, for example, that someone is having an affair or has a medical
problem.
In democratic societies with good governance and oversight, it is not unreasonable for law enforcement
to use large government databases to track and find criminals, but with the trust that comes from that
oversight. Knowing a car was used in a crime, finding the owner and tracking the driver at the time is
something expected by us in the UK.

However, in oppressive regimes this can now be used for suppressing human rights, such as finding a
posting on a news group that goes against the regime and using the IP address to find the service provider,
then the credit card details to find the poster, even though they thought their posting was anonymous. It’s
easy to find people, even if you have a pay-as-you-go tablet, it really depends on whether it is worth the
time and effort, which in most cases, fortunately, it is not.
Take, for example, a hacker managing to get in to loyalty scheme databases. It would be easy to mine the
data and identify alcoholics, etc. This is why certain large supermarket chains put huge amounts of effort
into protecting their databases. I have worked on a couple of these and the security controls do not just
stop unauthorised external access, they stop authorised staff doing unauthorised things.

The trouble is that not all organisations do such a good job of protecting their data. Worse still, individuals
are very bad at protecting their own information. One aspect of preventing data mining is you helping those
inexperienced or too trusting to protect themselves. For example; your parents, children, extended family
and friends, as they often do not understand the implications of giving out sensitive personal information
such as that posted on social media. Something like posting a photo on holiday to Facebook may be all that
is needed to tell someone you are not home and they can use the metadata from the picture of your BBQ
last Saturday to find where you live…..