Data profiling

The use of information about your lifestyle and habits to provide a descriptive profile of your life. At its simplest, data profiling is used by marketing companies to identify you as a possible customer. At its most complex, data profiling can be used by security services to identify potential suspects for unlawful activity, or to highlight parts of a person’s life where other forms of surveillance may reveal something about their activities. In those states where the European Directive on Data Protection is in force, you have rights of access to any data held about you for the purposes of data processing or profiling.