The Opportunities and Barriers of User Profiling in the Public Sector

Like the private sector, the public sector makes more and more use of user profiling to personalize the electronic services that are being offered to citizens. User profiling offers great opportunities to make communication more effective and efficient, to infer and predict citizens’ behavior and to even influence behavior. However, some drawbacks must be considered. Important differences between the private and public sector hinder the full employment of user profiling for governments and some general user profiling obstacles, such as access, trust, control and privacy have to be overcome to make fruitful use of user profiling.