How Personal & Internet Security Work

Chapter 20. The Dangers of Data Mining

To live in a modern society is to leave digital traces of yourself with almost every action you take. Buy a meal at a restaurant? You probably paid for it with your credit card. Take out a library book? There’s a record of it in a database. Get born? That gets entered into a database as well. Whether you buy a car, visit a bank, make a phone call, or do any of many commonplace tasks, a record of that transaction exists somewhere.

Businesses see gold in that data about you and hundreds of millions of other Americans, and the government sees ways it believes it can better protect its citizens.

But the information ...