Privacy Endangerment with the Use of Data Mining An emergent Information Technology (IT) issue that has been rising in the past few years has been data mining. Data mining is utilized to retrieve personal identifiable information provided by individuals through the use of Internet services such as: social media networks, email, and other networks that contain data bases full of personal information. If such data retrieval if not done careful, it can cause ethical issues for the companies that are involved. The ethical issues related to data mining are violation of privacy, confidentiality, and respect of persons’ rights. Issues that required the immediate attention regarding data mining are: What stops corporations from sharing personal identifiable information with other companies?; How effectively and ethically data mining is use by the government?; Is our privacy and confidentiality truly protected? Social network companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google provide users agreements upon joining their services. These agreements underline how the information provided by the user will be utilize by the company and it allows the user to understand how to protect their personal identifiable information while utilizing these social network sites. These companies pride themselves in protecting users’ personal information. However, what happens when the company or an unethical company employee violates these agreements? Personal identifiable information is then released to use as it pleases by the company or the individual that obtains access to this personal information illegally. On “January 19, 2006, when the Department of Justice subpoenaed Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL for data on user queries submitted to their online search engines and a random sample of one million indexed web addresses… the Department of Justice sought to use this data