Over the past 40 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has systematically chipped away at the 19th Century decisions that afforded Americans the same privacy rights that John Wilkes enjoyed in 1763. According to Rosen, the government's crusades for civil rights, and against white collar crime and drugs are largely responsible for the erosion of personal privacy rights. Data and information quality are seriously harmed when privacy rights vanish. The article appears on page 36. The article was written by Professor David Hand, Statistics Department, The Open University, United Kingdom.
Most statisticians are concerned with primary data analysis.
That is, the data are collected with a particular question or questions in mind. The paper's author views data mining as the process of secondary analysis of large databases aimed at finding unsuspected relationships which are of interest or value to the database owners. One major problem that data mining poses for Statisticians is the huge size of the databases Statisticians may have to analyze. Huge databases may not be able to be efficiently processed by mainframe and personal computers. And, according to the article's author huge databases pose problems that statisticians have never have confronted in the in the past.