Limit E-Data Mining: EPIC To Congress

Data mining - finding information patterns in electronic databases and using them to harvest and sell or trade personal information - should be limited strictly by Congress because this kind of information is sold too regularly to federal law enforcement agencies, the Electronic Privacy Information Center said this week.

"When employed for the limited purposes of fraud detection or product quality, data mining poses little risk to privacy and civil liberties," said EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg and deputy counsel Chris Hoofnagle, in a letter to the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census. "However, when these systems are employed to evaluate future intent or action, data mining presents serious risks to a distinctly American value: the right to be let alone."

EPIC wants Congress to consider sever limits on the information commercial data miners can sell to the government. The Rotenberg/Hoofnagle letter was submitted for the record when the subcommittee held a March 25 hearing on data mining. "Some of these private-sector information brokers sell detailed consumer purchasing data that exists in no public records system," they said. "The information sold by these commercial data brokers could be used for data mining."

The e-privacy watchdog group called for Congress to launch oversight hearings on information brokers and their practices, to ask agencies to report "routinely" on private sector databases they buy, and to determine whether the 1974 Privacy Act should apply to the entire information brokerage industry. "(T)hese businesses," Rotenberg and Hoofnagle wrote, "are now engaged in the practice of building government profiles of individuals that would be regulated under the Privacy Act."