Data Mining
By analyzing the big data , i.e., the digital breadcrumbs of human activities sensed
as a by-product of the ICT systems that we use, we have today the opportunity to
observe and measure how our society intimately works. These data describe the
daily human activities: e.g., automated payment systems record the tracks of our
purchases, search engines record the logs of our queries for fi nding information on
the web, social networking services record our connections to friends, colleagues
and collaborators, wireless networks and mobile devices record the traces of our
movements and our communications.
These social data are at the heart of the idea of a knowledge society, where decisions
can be taken on the basis of knowledge in these data. Social data analysis can
help us understand complex social phenomena, such as mobility, relationships and
social connections, economic trends, spread of epidemics, opinion diffusion, sustainability,
and so on.
The opportunities of discovering knowledge from social data increase with the
risk of privacy violation: during knowledge discovery, the risk is the uncontrolled
intrusion into the personal data of the data subjects, namely, of the (possibly
unaware) people whose data are being collected, analyzed and mined. Privacy intrusion
jeopardizes trust: if not adequately countered, they can undermine the idea of a
fair and democratic knowledge society.