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A Study of Data Mining and Information Ethics in the Development of Information Systems Professionals

Data and the information culled from that data is an extremely valuable organizational resource. Every data mining professional is aware of this, but few are well-educated on the impact that data mining could have on privacy and the laws surrounding the privacy of personal data. In a recent survey, van Wel and Royakkers (2004) showed that 20 data-mining professionals “prefer to focus on the advantages of web-data mining instead of discussing the possible dangers.” These professionals argued that web-data mining does not threaten privacy. Part of the reason some professionals are not concerned over the possible misuse of their work and the possible harm it might cause might lie in the content of the data mining courses they have taken and in the textbooks they used to learn their craft. This paper presents a project that investigates the need for an expanded role of ethics in data mining education for future information systems professionals. Our contention is that ethics and the social impact of data mining must be an integral part of every data mining course. The methodology will consist of a survey of data mining textbooks to determine the actual extent of coverage of ethical issues (the focus of this paper), and in the future, a survey of schools on the coverage of ethical issues in their data mining courses, development of ethical cases appropriate for use in a data mining course, and the implementation of a data mining course that integrates ethical issues into its curriculum.