(n.) A
software application that monitors and/or analyzes the activities of a computer, and subsequently its user, of the purpose of collecting information that typically will be used for marketing purposes. The two most common forms of data miners are
data mining programs that an organization uses to analyze its own data to look for significant patterns, and
spyware programs that are uploaded to a user s computer to monitor the user s activity and send the data back to the organization, typically so that the organization can send the user targeted advertising.