TABLE OF CONTENTS With every call you make on your cell phone and every swipe of your debit and credit cards, a digital signature of when, what, and where you call or buy is incrementally built every second of every day in the servers of your credit card provider and wireless carrier. Monitoring the digital signatures of your consumer DNA-like code are models created with data mining technologies, looking for deviations from the norm, which, once spotted, instantly issue silent alerts to monitor your card or phone for potential theft. This is nothing new; it has been taking place for years. What is different is that since 9/11, this use of data mining will take an even more active role in the areas of criminal detection, security, and behavioral profiling.
Behavioral profiling is not racial profiling, which is not only illegal, but a crude and ineffective process. Racial profiling simply does not work; race is just too broad a category to be useful; it is one-dimensional. What is important, however, is suspicious behavior and the related digital information found in diverse databases, which data mining can be used to analyze and quantify. Behavioral profiling is the capability to recognize patterns of criminal activity, to predict when and where crimes are likely to take place, and to identify their perpetrators. Precrime is not science fiction; it is the objective of data mining techniques based on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The same data mining technologies that have been used by marketers to...
