From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishprofilingpro‧fil‧ing /ˈprəʊfaɪlɪŋ $ ˈproʊ-/ noun [uncountable] 1 → offender profiling2 American English when people who belong to a particular race or group are stopped and searched, for example by the police or at airports, because the police think that they are more likely to commit crimes racial profiling3 when companies collect information about people that they wish to sell something to
Examples from the Corpus
profiling• But the method proposed goes hand in hand with the method of assessing individuals by profiling.• These applications include customer profiling, the analysis of retail catchment areas, sales forecasting and retail branch siting.• The third is for companies to acquire software for profiling, cross-analysing and clustering the census variables against their own customer records.• Many schools are now looking at the whole issue of profiling and records of achievement.From Longman Business Dictionaryprofilingpro‧fil‧ing /ˈprəʊfaɪlɪŋˈproʊ-/ noun [uncountable] the activity of collecting information about someone or something → competency profiling → competitor profiling → customer profiling 