Application Domains
Profiling technologies can be applied in a variety of different domains and for a variety of purposes. These profiling practices will all have different effect and raise different issues.
Knowledge about the behaviour and preferences of customers is of great interest to the commercial sector. On the basis of profiling technologies, companies can predict the behaviour of different types of customers. Marketing strategies can then be tailored to the people fitting these types. Examples of profiling practices in marketing are customers loyalty cards, customer relationship management in general, and personalized advertising.
In the financial sector, institutions use profiling technologies for fraud prevention and credit scoring. Banks want to minimise the risks in giving credit to their customers. On the basis of extensive group profiling customers are assigned a certain scoring value that indicates their creditworthiness. Financial institutions like banks and insurance companies also use group profiling to detect fraud or money-laundering. Databases with transactions are searched with algorithms to find behaviours that deviate from the standard, indicating potentially suspicious transactions.
In the context of employment, profiles can be of use for tracking employees by monitoring their online behaviour, for the detection of fraud by them, and for the deployment of human resources by pooling and ranking their skills. (Leopold & Meints 2008) .
Profiling can also be used to support people at work, and also for learning, by intervening in the design of adaptive hypermedia systems personalising the interaction. For instance, this can be useful for supporting the management of attention (Nabeth 2008).
In forensic science, the possibility exists of linking different databases of cases and suspects and mining these for common patterns. This could be used for solving existing cases or for the purpose of establishing risk profiles of potential suspects (Geradts & Sommer 2008) (Harcourt 2006).
Read more about this topic: Profiling Practices
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