Particularly With the Relatively Recent Passage and

Particularly with the relatively recent passage and renewal of the nation's 2002 Homeland Security Act, individual Americans are becoming more and more concerned that their retrieval and use of information is being tracked, not simply through the paper libraries of the nation, but also via the World Wide Web.

However, although there is a concern that one can leave one's information imprint and compromise one's privacy when tracking relevant data -- for instance, a student researching hate groups could be unfairly targeted as a potential sympathizer with such organizations, if he or she leaves a 'track' on his or her high school's hard drive -- one cannot ensure that no data fingerprints are left upon personal or public hard drives or search engines themselves when users access data via large-scale data warehouses.

Until the last few years, data warehousing traditionally focused on relational technology, namely the storing large amounts of data, which made privacy less of a concern than the current shift to relational databases. Relational databases are typically more able to handle ad hoc, speed-of-thought analytical querying for large user communities. But with the use of such online analytical processing, otherwise known as OLAP technology, the privacy of individual users may be more easily compromised, and patterns of use for users are more easily formatted, tracked and profiled.

This is a happy occurrence for law services agencies, but not necessarily for innocent computer users, although users do benefit from OLAP technology's deployment in the immediate, short run, as they may be able to more easily focus and redirect their queries.

However, the more such data bases have come into use, the better able to trackers have been able create patterns and directed queries through masses of data, and the better able individual hackers, law agencies, and others (such as advertisers0 are able to trace one's virtual footprints via the web.

(Hyperion, 2000) The solution to this problem may be legal, rather than technical, although the computer and online community is understandably, given recent legal patterns, quite wary of entrusting the law to protect overall user privacy and to prevent tracking patterns regarding searches. (Kaufman, et. al, 2002) Users may be able to block advertising and Spam mail directed towards their email addresses.