Ethical Implications of Data Mining in Canada

Running Head: CANADA BUSINESS ETHICS
Canada Business Ethics
Student’s Name
University Name
Author’s Note

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CANADA BUSINESS ETHICS
This essay undertakes a detailed evaluation of data mining activities with context to specific
instances in order to determine the ethical implications associated with data mining. The
primary Idea regarding data mining is to analyse the large and complex data bases as well as
identify necessary patterns, Trends as well as information in the domain of unorganised data.
This is a crucial task that needs to be accomplished by design software programs as well as
algorithms that enhance machine learning. The utility of data mining has been successfully
recognised in the fields like retail e-commerce, business organisations, Healthcare and so on. In
specific domains of business like marketing, sales as well as E-Commerce, along with retail, data
mining is very necessary for analysis of the consumer behaviour in order to determine the Trends
and thereby enhance the scope of generation of revenue and profit by the company. In the
domain of Healthcare, data mining is also utilised for storage of patient data, which can help in
reduction of cost as well as physically get other health related process. The Insurance sector in
Canada also started to utilise determining for the same purpose of storage of customer data and
their analysis. In fact, government agencies of Canada also reputed for using data mining
facilities for gaining access as well as store large volumes of individual information in order to
facilitate the process of providing security to the individuals of the nation.
The ethical implications of the business organisations increasing data mining are completely
different from that of the legal implications. Conducting theft can be defined as illegal however
the act of thinking to conduct for the attempt to conduct a theft will be termed as unethical.
Therefore the concern within public in this case is that when the organisations are storing their
shopping information or other kind of personalized data, to revert back to them with customised
product offerings, whether they should consider it to be unethical or ethical1. However, in spite
of this, researchers considered that ethical implications surrounding data mining are all prone to
1 Floridi, L., & Taddeo, M. (2016). What is data ethics?.

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CANADA BUSINESS ETHICS
a gray area. The complete package of the technology utilised for data mining can be considered
as good, not bad, since it has various utility advantages for the public good also. Which the
popular rise in applications that are used for data mining in various organisations, pertaining to
various individual industrial domain, parallel as well as equivalent rise in concern regarding the
ethics associated with mining of the personal data of customers for driving the motive like traffic
generation have come into question. In several cases, it has been observed that the organisations
have not provided statutory warning to the customers that their personal data is being produced
in the organisations database and will be utilised in the future for product offering purposes2.
This can obviously be termed as unethical because it is not certain that when the customer on
learning that his or her personal data is being concerned by the organisation, would have
provided the licence to the company to store the respective data or not. According to the views of
researchers the procedure of data mining by the organisations is not expected to reduce in the
future times. On the contrary, it will be increasing more and more, with number of organisations
getting access to power of Computer technology.
One of the most essential as well as frequently observed issues regarding the mining of personal
data of customers as well as other organisation of stakeholders is during the time when the data
is mined from the consumption behaviour displayed by the individual customer or other
stakeholder. The data which is preserved from that source is often utilised for marketing more
products as well services to the individuals. Maximum data mining is conducted for this purpose
2 Hajian, S., Bonchi, F., & Castillo, C. (2016, August). Algorithmic bias: From discrimination discovery to fairness-
aware data mining. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and
data mining (pp. 2125-2126). ACM.