The Advantages and Disadvantages of Data Mining

While technology emerges in our everyday lives, people find new ways to manipulate it into their advantage. Data mining is one of these new technologies that many people including companies are using to their advantage for many things such as increasing sales or recognizing important patterns to their business. Data mining is the computational process of discovering patterns in large amounts of data and presenting it into useful information.

Data mining has many positives as well as negatives. Some positives include increasing sales and decreasing costs for businesses, giving financial institutes more information about loan information and credit reporting and the government detecting money laundering or criminal activities. Businesses who use data mining can see what the customers like and don’t like, this allows them to change products or change costs which is beneficial to them and the consumer. Financial institutes like banks that use data mining can determine a person’s credit history to be good or bad, thus saving them money and time as well as doing the customer a favor. Governments who use data mining can figure out fraudulent and criminal activities by recognizing patterns in a person’s spending habits, which in return makes the world more ethical. All of these positives may seem fine, but there are many negatives that are also consider when referring to data mining. One of them being privacy issues. A lot of people are afraid their personal information is collected and used in a inadequate way. With the rise in internet forums and other websites that require you to sign-up and enter personal information, this information can be sold to other businesses for their own marketing purposes, which makes the consumer feel violated in terms of their privacy. If business are storing huge amounts of data, this data has the chance to the breached or hacked. Hackers can access a huge amount of data from a business if they hack into their business, resulting in stolen credit cards and other financial information. This has happened to a couple of companies in the past, like Sony, and is one of the major negatives of storing large amounts of data. All of the information businesses acquire from data mining can be misused and taken advantage of. For example, businesses can find out that consumers tend to rely on one product more than other, they can then increase the price of said product which means consumers, like us, will have to pay more for this product. Therefore, there are many positives and negatives to data mining, yet they both affect our lives in one way or another.

Data mining is an emerging technology which has already become a part of our lives without us knowing it. Many businesses use data mining to their advantage, most notably grocery stores. Let’s take Amazon for example, a very huge electronic commerce delivery service uses data mining all of the time. They recommend products based on your previous searches or transaction history. They get all of this information from the products you purchase and use it to market more of their products. Grocery stores also use data mining. They occasionally send coupons in the mail of products that are proven to sell and generate revenue, thus further increasing their revenue by giving coupons so the consumer feels the need to buy the product. I think data mining is sustainable for the long term because it has been proven to be so effective and businesses are the top contenders for using it. It has increased the profits for so many businesses that they will continue to utilize it whenever they can. With us millennials, technology and buying stuff online has come become normal, and part of our lives just like anything else, so for future generations to come, data mining will only increase and continue to be sustained.

The major players in data mining are, without a doubt, businesses. They are the ones who can make the most out of large amounts of information for various amounts of things. Many consumers are part of the data in one way or another, and with the ever growing market of technology and electronic commerce, it will not cease to exist any time soon. Normal people like us don’t really have any use for data mining in our lives, although, data mining does open up many job opportunities for people, allowing them to get involved in it, one way or another. Businesses have been using data mining since the start of it, and there is no doubt it will not go away.

To conclude, data mining has many benefits that can be matched with negatives as well. Data mining is very significant to businesses and corporations but to the average consumer, data mining can cause more negative effects than good. Data mining has the sustainability it needs to be relevant in the future and will not be insignificant any time soon. With technology growing faster than it ever has, I hope to see more amazing things data mining can accomplish.