Data mining has a wide range of applications around the world, ranging from retail companies using it to analyse people's shopping habits in their store, to scientific research groups using it to find correlations in their experimental data.

The most common use at this time is by the retail industry, many supermarkets, rental stores and restaurants use data mining to help them maximise their profits. In some stores when you pay for your shopping and use your credit card it is saved onto a database so they can begin to build a 'profile' of you and what you like to buy in their store, they then use this to send personalised advertisements to you based on what your favourite products are. Stores also use data mining to help maximise their sales potential by correlating which products are brought on a specific day e.g. on a friday the sales of a store's beer might go up so if they analysed the data they could ensure they had enough beer stock for friday. Store's also use it to compare the most common combinations of products e.g. If 20 customers bought Ice cream AND jelly but only 5 bought Ice cream AND Yoghurt the store could adjust its layout to place the ice cream and jelly near each other, again this is to help boost profits.

Supermarkets are not the only ones who use data mining, rental stores also use it to target customers with advertising. One example of this is a certain DVD rental store kept details on the rental history of each customer, from this they used data mining to work out what each customer's favourite genre of film was. They then used this data to send them personalised adverts highlighting new releases of their favourite type of film or special offers on that film.

The above usage is an example of where privacy concerns regarding data mining begin to come in, some argue that keeping this kind of information on a person is unlawful as it means that a company has kept their personal taste in film or other product in a database and is then using it to target adverts at them.

Another, perhaps more legitimate and accepted use of data mining is from scientific research groups which use it to analyse complex data gathered from experiments and then correlate it to show patterns. It has also been recently used to analyse the structure of materials so that new materials can be researched and developed.

Companies that produce medicines also use data mining so that they can compare the data on side effects of medicine on a large scale, they can then spot potential issues with a certain medicine early and prevent more serious harm being caused by harmful medicine.

Although data farming does have its legitimate uses (as shown above) the first examples of it show that it is not without its downside, although data mining is not the problem itself, the use of it by certain companies show that it can be used for negative reasons.