ATS appears to use data mining to single out people as suspected terrorists or criminals. If data mining worked to catch terrorists, a program like ATS would deserve widespread endorsement. Unfortunately, data mining does not have this capability.
Data mining is a technique for extracting knowledge from large sets of data. Scientists, marketers and other researchers use it successfully to identify patterns and accurate generalizations when they do not have or do not need specific leads.
Jim Harper is director of Information Policy Studies and the author of Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood. He is coauthor of the forthcoming Cato policy analysis, "Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining."
More by Jim Harper
For example, 1-800-FLOWERS has used data mining to distinguish among customers who generally only buy flowers once a year — on Valentine's Day — and those who might purchase bouquets and gifts year-round. It markets to the first group less often, and to the second group more often. With thousands of customers to study, their researchers get useful information from data mining.
However, despite the investment of billions of dollars and unparalleled access to U.S. consumer behavior data, the direct marketing industry achieves response rates ranging from 5.78 percent for telephone solicitation to 0.04 percent for direct response television. Marketers do not know which potential customers will come to a new store, much less what they will buy. Data mining cannot predict such specific information.
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