Abstract
Data mining is not an invasion of privacy because access to data is only by machines, not by people: this is the argument that is investigated here. The current importance of this problem is developed in a case study of data mining in the USA for counterterrorism and other surveillance purposes. After a clarification of the relevant nature of privacy, it is argued that access by machines cannot warrant the access to further information, since the analysis will have to be made either by humans or by machines that understand. It concludes that the current data mining violates the right to privacy and should be subject to the standard legal constraints for access to private information by people.
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Notes
"The law requires the NSA to not deliberately collect data on US citizens or on persons in the United States without a warrant based on foreign intelligence requirements.” (9/11 Commission 2004, 87) This avoidance of domestic data was considered a significant factor for the failure to prevent the 11 September 2001 attacks (ibid.).
Edwin Meese on MSNBC, in Chris Mattews’ program “Hardball”, 12 January 2006, 19:45. Fried in his article in the Boston Globe (Fried 2005). Fried was solicitor general in the second Reagan administration. Taipale argues data-mining is “…different than claiming that ‘everybody is being investigated’ through pattern-matching. In reality only the electronic footprints of transactions and activities are being scrutinized” (Taipale 2003, 66).
This is a common form of vehicle theft prevention worldwide. Germany now requires all trucks to carry GPS and logs their travel to collect motorway tolls. In 2005, it was seriously considered in Great Britain to control all movement of all vehicles via GPS, as a means to collect road tolls for the entire country, in replacement of road tax. Access to the center of London is already controlled by a system that logs license plates of all vehicles entering and leaving the designated zone. GPS has been used by US car rental companies to issue speeding tickets to their customers, a practice that has been legally challenged (O’Harrow 2005, 292).
Now spreading very widely: Used by all suppliers of WalMart, i.e. practically all consumer products in the USA. Required by law in the EU to be injected in all domestic cats and dogs.
It is estimated, as an extreme case, that London has 2.5 million video cameras, the average Londoner is filmed 300 times per day (US Congress 2002 2). The whole USA had about 2 million cameras in 2002 (Bailey 2004, 75; Keenan 2005, 57). Some London boroughs connect their video data to face-recognition software (O’Harrow 2005, 165f).
The sequence by 1024 is megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, etc. The original report explains “If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information.” (Lyman and Varian 2003) Such numbers must be taken with great caution, particularly since the notion of “amount of data” is utterly meaningless if data is not taken to be digital (How much data is there on your desk?). Even digital data can be compressed and have many formats. Some sources say that “intelligence data sources grow at the rate of four petabytes a month” (O’Harrow 2005, 212).
The same provisions, excluding military operations and intelligence activities overseas or against non-US citizens are in the “Department of Homeland Securities Appropriations Act”, sect. 8131 (b), as quoted in (Taipale 2003, 10, n. 28).
For more information about the NSA, consider National security archive 2005.
About the failure to identify 11 September: “To put this into perspective, throughout the summer of 2001 we had more than 30 warnings that something was imminent. We dutifully reported these, yet none of these subsequently correlated with terrorist attacks. The concept of ‘imminent’ to our adversaries is relative; it can mean soon or simply sometime in the future.” (Hayden 2002, 4) Hayden also stresses the difficulty of identifying and processing several languages and the crucial factor of processing on time.
Most references to TIA have been removed from the DARPA sites, but Director Pointexter’s outlook can be gathered from his slides (Poindexter 2002).
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Acknowledgments
The writing of this paper was carried out mainly during a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship in Research at Princeton University. I am very grateful for this excellent opportunity. A first version of the paper, entitled “If You Had Nothing to Hide, Would You Still Mind Being Watched by Machines?” was presented at the workshop “Privacy: intercultural perspectives” at ZiF, Bielefeld University, in February 2006. I thank Karsten Weber for the invitation and all participants for the very stimulating discussions at that pleasant meeting. I also thank Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic for the very useful written comments.
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Müller, V.C. Would you mind being watched by machines? Privacy concerns in data mining. AI & Soc 23, 529–544 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0177-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0177-3