Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Preliminaries for a Critical Examination of the Data Driven Society

Data Mining (DM) is the analytical activity aimed at revealing new “knowledge” from data useful for further decision-making processes. These techniques have recently acquired enormous importance as they seem to fit perfectly the requests of the so called “Data Driven World”. In this paper, first I give an overview of DM, and of the most relevant criticisms raised so far. Then using a well-known case study and the European General Data Protection Regulation as benchmark, I show that there are some specific ambiguities in this use of “knowledge” which are relevant for the ethical and legal assessment of DM.