Legal Obstacles to Data Mining

Legal Obstacles

What are the legal obstacles to data mining? What problems could occur? What solutions would you propose?

The legal obstacles to data mining are data ownership, privacy of the data, and the expected results (Jensen, Jensen, & Brunak, 2012). When conducting data mining, it is vital that the researcher establishes who owns the data. Failure to do this would result in legal issues. The person who is entitled to it at any particular time owns the data. Data miners should ensure they know who the data owner is before data mining is conducted. Privacy of the data is another obstacle to data mining. Patients who submit their information to a health care facility would want a guarantee that their data will not be used for other purposes without their consent. Patient privacy should be respected at all times in the process of data mining. The expected results for data mining should be beneficial to the patients or medical community. No data analysis should be conducted for nefarious or frivolous purposes.

The problems that could occur from the above-mentioned legal obstacles are abuse of patient data, and lawsuits. A researcher could misuse the data and misrepresent information in their final findings. A researcher could also have another agenda and use the patient data for their own gain. Protection if patient privacy is vital to ensure that no patient data is published. Lawsuits are likely in case data mining is conducted without patient consent. Patient data is legally protected, and data mining should respect this law. Data miners could discover irregularities that would result in lawsuits to the health care facilities. Any omission by the data miners might be perceived to be a malpractice, which would lead to a malpractice suit.

In order to guard against any legal obstacles, it is vital that the health care facilities obtain patient consent when gathering data from patients. This way they would use the data for data mining and not be faced with any privacy issues. To prevent misuse of the data, the health care facilities should ensure that no personally identifiable data is used for the process. Personally identifiable information could result in other lawsuits and misrepresentation of information. Data ownership should be established in the initial phase of data collection. The data miners should ensure that know who owns the data before they can begin conducting data mining. This will prevent any future lawsuits of obtaining data illegally.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rendered an opinion in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Inc. case. Do you think the majority opinion is a correct one?

The majority opinion was the correct one because as they stated individuals should not lose their religious freedom once they open a business. It is vital that individuals are allowed the freedom to exercise their religion without having to incur heavy burdens due to their business. The mandate placed upon the Greens by the Health and Human Services for them to provide life-terminating drugs in their health insurance was infringing on their constitutional right of religion freedom (Shapiro, 2014). The business owners were burdened in that their religion did not allow for termination of life at any stage. The HHS had exempted nonprofit religious organizations from this directive and had treated the corporations as individuals. That being the case, the argument presented by the HHS that for-profit corporations should not be considered as persons was inconceivable. The HHS should treat and have the same standards for both corporations.