Data Mining and Group Profiling on the Internet

Lately there is a tendency of many companies operating on the Internet to only grant you access to their websites when you fill out an inquiery. Such inquieries ask for your name, address, e-mail address and more. These data, sometimes combined with surfing behaviour, are then used to discover knowledge with datamining techniques. Datamining is an automatic analysis, using mathematical algorithms, to find patterns and relations in the data. From the results group profiles can be derived, showing a property or a group of properties of a certain group of people. Such group profiles are very practical for direct marketing means. However, such group profiles can have negative implications for the privacy of the people involved. In this paper the advantages and disadvantages of datamining and group profiling on the Internet are discussed and a few solutions are suggested to the raised problems. These solutions consist of a combination of changes in the current legislation and the application of cryptographic modules that anonymize your identity on the Internet.