A Hidden Challenge to the Regulation of Data Surveillance

Profiling is a data surveillance technique which is little-understood and ill-documented, but increasingly used. It is a means of generating suspects or prospects from within a large population, and involves inferring a set of characteristics of a particular class of person from past experience, then searching data-holdings for individuals with a close fit to that set of characteristics. It is rather different from better-known data surveillance techniques such as front-end verification and data matching. It raises rather different issues, and requires rather different regulatory measures. This paper surveys the limited information available, defines and describes the technique and its social implication, and argues the case for action by regulators.