People overly boogieman data mining. It’s just data, that’s mostly available elsewhere anyway. All the efforts to “clean” your machine just inconvenience you, anybody really curious about your internet habits can still find them from you ISP, the various DNS, and the places you visit. Meanwhile most of the data mining is just trying not to send salsa ads to white people in Minnesota.
Well, yes and no. More than a decade ago, data mining software was developed for police use that effectively plotted the life of criminal suspects. It included where they offended, how they offended, who they associated with, their m.o. file, who they were related to, and the list went on and on.
Soon it transcended the ability of normal LEOs to see relationships and make connections, even if they had the same information in front of them. But when the second Iraq war came about, the light dawned that this software could be adapted and improved for use against complicated terrorist networks.
But with real money and expertise behind it, this software went through generational improvements, eventually migrating back to the US not for routine use against criminals, but for an ever expanding surveillance of ordinary citizens.
The need for increasing levels of data to input finally started to reach into the persistent problem of “information overload”, like a librarian. Even to what is written in the Internet.
There are now at least a half a dozen major public information security systems in use. The NSA is even opening a brand new facility in Utah just to handle and sort the immense data flow, and looking for increasingly subtle hints of what people may do in the future.