The central question of the book is, in the words of the author: “Can social media (and other) data mining ever be considered acceptable or be used in ways that we consider acceptable?”

Its answer is a thorough study of the practice, perception, and consequences of social media mining, well beyond the obvious arguments about privacy, discriminatory practices, political and social engineering implications, and monetization. The book is well documented and strives to present the ethical (and some of the technical) limitations and possibilities of social media insight.

The author leverages direct interviews with stakeholders from academic, government, and nonprofit agencies as well as several experimental projects carried out in the UK.

Leveraging this experience, as well as academic research, the book elaborates on the life cycle of a data mining project: identifying subject data, evaluating its quality and relevance, asking the right questions on this data, constructing an actionable analysis, and evaluating the results of the analysis. Concerns about ad hoc methodologies and black-box analysis are discussed in the context of the pervasive “desire for numbers,” the new corporate and institutional imperative.

More importantly, the book discusses how the mined social media data can, or fails to, enable organizational change and institutional accountability in a time when data mining is pervasive and “ordinary.” Separate sections are devoted to the specific issues in the public and private sectors, as well as academic and nonprofit organizations, especially small institutions that use standard data mining solutions.

This book will be useful to data mining engineers, data analysts, lawyers, and activists in the area who want a wide-angle view of the social impact of social media insight.

A basic understanding of the technical ecosystem and capabilities of data mining in the open web is a side benefit, even though this book is not a technical reference.

In summary, readers will discover that not everything that (momentarily) shines in the web is information gold, especially because those who carry out or evaluate the social data mining analyses often fail to gather the right type of information or understand its impact on their own organizations.