Personal Information in a modern, Digital Age :: Internet Privacy Essays

Personal Information in a Modern, Digital Age In the past when you wanted to purchase goods you could go to the store, pick up your items, pay and leave. While these activities are still possible, more and more today we find ourselves pressured to get â€Å"savers cards.† Modern businesses, like never before, track who you are and what you are burying in an effort to be able to better serve you and become more efficient. While great for the companies implementing these policies, what does it mean for your privacy, and your wallet? Now more than ever our lives are electronically based. People can access their banking information over the Internet, setup all kinds of funds transfers, as well as purchase and sell items. Our consumer lives are being tracked, and that information sold to other businesses. Business communicate and sell their consumer lists with each other. Data is one of the most important corporate assets of companies, governments and research institutions. It is now possible to have fast access, to correlate information stored in independent and distant databases, to analyse and visualise data on-line and use data mining tools for automatic and semi-automatic exploration and pattern discovery. (acs) This opens the door for a new kind of scam for a new age, identity theft. If someone were able to pass themselves off as you, they could effectively become you, for the purposes of getting credit, making large purchases, or even committing crimes. After collecting this data it is entered into what is called a data warehouse. Companies and governments store all of their accumulated in their data warehouses. Data warehousing is defined as A collection of data designed to support management decision making. Data warehouses contain a wide variety of data that present a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time. Development of a data warehouse includes development of systems to extract data from operating systems plus installation of a warehouse database system that provides managers flexible access to the data. The term data warehousing generally refers to the combination of many different databases across an entire enterprise. (webopidia) Today businesses accumulate all the data they can gather into a data warehouse, from which they can do data mining. This means that when you go to the grocery store and use your saver card, to get the tiny percent off, that store tracks what you buy and enters it into their data warehouse.