Data Mining and the Five Pillars of Information Assurance: Where Does Society Draw the Line?

The intent of this paper is to examine the basics of the legal, social and ethical issues implicit in commercial data mining ventures. With the advances in middleware and the enhancements to Business Intelligence tools, mining of the virtual data warehouses is expanding faster than the processes that control them. The question is, “How can organizations apply the 5 pillars of Information Assurance to this mining operation, while not alienating the individuals from whom the information is collected? What are the legalities of confidentiality, and how do we prevent the invasion of privacy. Who is truly the owner of the data being captured, stored, and interrogated?” The ethical questions with regard to the ability to collect versus the correctness of collecting available data, as well as insider snooping of the collected data will be explored. Lastly, the recent findings on the social impact of the data’s integrity and authentication will be reviewed in the light of the Choice Point exploit.