False Positives versus Citizen Profiles
By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO
A post from Steve Bennett in Australia refers to an announcement by the Dutch government about their intent to prevent crime by profiling their citizens. By creating a digital profile of each citizen using banking, flight, and internet usage information, their justice department plans to compare citizen profiles with those of convicted criminals, then let law enforcement authorities know when matches are found. Needless to day, the move has created quite a bit of discussion in the Netherlands.
In no way would such a move fly in the United States. From the time of its founding, our citizens have consistently shown a distrust of government that has limited its control over basic freedoms. While some would argue that the U.S. government has gained too much control over the years, that healthy distrust has definitely limited government intrusion into our personal freedoms.
In contrast to the broad approach proposed by the Dutch Minister of Justice, systems using entity resolution can avoid the “boil the ocean” approach. You can target specific data sources that hold relevant information, and then compare the bare minimum of attributes needed to discover hidden relationships, all without creating and storing profiles on millions of non-criminal citizens.
With such a system, can false positives occur? Yes, but the technology has become so sophisticated that the chance of a false positive is minuscule. The judgment to be made is whether the number of false positives outweighs the increased level of security afforded the public.
No doubt, the lively discussion between those concerned about invasion of privacy and those focused on keeping the populace safe will continue. And that’s how it should be.
Subscribe to this blog