The conditions and consequences of profiling in commercial and governmental settings

Profiling is a technique whereby a set of characteristics of a particular class of person is inferred from past experience, and data holdings are then searched for individuals with a close fit to that set of characteristics. The results of profiling bring individuals' civil liberties and privacy into conflict with apparently legitimate applications of data collection, manipulation and filtering. This paper considers certain aspects of the information environment that enable the accession, collection, collation and analysis of data from large databases containing personal information from public and private sources. It describes some of the current types of profiling in both commercial and governmental settings and the stated purpose of such activities. Some implications and consequences of such collection manipulation and analyses are then presented.