Data mining can be used in helpful ways, such as when unemployment figures are used to evaluate the economy. It can also be used to gain information and make comparisons between sets of data in order to make decisions for large groups of people, such as a city or state government organization would need to make regarding the use of public services or utilities.
Paper and face to face surveys are an old fashioned form of data mining. So is the Federal Census. Data mining does not have to be done by a computer, but it is the fastest and most efficient manner of gathering anonymous information.