Meaning & use
data farming
Last updated
Meanings
noununcountabledisapproving
The practice of gathering large amounts of personal information from users, often through apps or websites, to sell or analyze it.
Grammar: Not used with an or an: data farming is common online.
Patterns
- data farming by someone
Privacy groups accused the free app of data farming.
Data farming allows companies to build detailed profiles of shoppers.
Quizzes that ask for personal details are sometimes a cover for data farming.
noununcountabletechnicalspecialist
A method of running many computer simulations with varied settings to produce large sets of results for study.
Grammar: Technical sense; the subject is the research method: data farming helps military planners.
Patterns
- data farming for something
Researchers used data farming to explore thousands of possible outcomes.
Data farming lets planners test how a plan reacts to small changes.
The team described data farming in the conference paper.
Common combinations
- engage in data farming
- The firm was accused of engaging in data farming.
- data farming operation
- Regulators shut down a data farming operation.
- data farming scam
- The survey turned out to be a data farming scam.
- concerns about data farming
- Users raised concerns about data farming.
Synonyms and how they differ
- data harvesting
- Data harvesting is nearly interchangeable but suggests the act of collecting, while farming implies ongoing cultivation.
- data mining
- Data mining means searching existing data for patterns, not gathering the data itself.
- data scraping
- Data scraping specifically means pulling public information off websites automatically.
Word family
Commonly confused: data farming or data mining?
data farming vs data mining
Data mining analyzes information you already hold; data farming focuses on collecting or generating it.
Practice
The privacy regulator warned that the free game was ___, collecting users' contacts and location without clear consent.
Choose one answer.
Data farming means gathering large amounts of personal information. The other terms do not describe this practice.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “data farming”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.