6 ms·

This is interesting because I always thought these "background checks" were just a formality. Like something needed for their insurance or to weed out a few ext

This is interesting because I always thought these "background checks" were just a formality. Like something needed for their insurance or to weed out a few extreme individuals (like those with multiple-DUIs or a heavy history of wrecks on their record). But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft. It really is fascinating.

dvdbloc 7y ago
Correlation does not imply causation
- orev 7y ago
  You can’t have causation without correlation.
  - anonthrowaway2 7y ago
    You definitely can. A control system causes a signal to be ~constant and thus ~uncorrelated to whatever you care to name.
    - whytaka 7y ago
      But there’d be another variable that is correlated.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      If a control system's output is uncorrelated with what it is controlling, then it's not really controlling it. Also, to see a clear linear correlation, you might need to know what you're looking for. A controller output may look uncorrelated with the target system state, until you realize it's a I controller, so you need to look for correlation between controller's output and the integral of the system's state.
      - DougBTX 7y ago
        Let’s say there is a system that controls whether a second system receives input from random source A or random source B, and there is some difference in the distribution of values generated from each source. Starting without knowing the relationship between the two systems, is there a good general approach that could pick out what it is doing?
        barrkel 7y ago
        Replace the system with one that chooses A only; replace it with one that chooses B only; analyze distributions; analyze original system. Or replace A with known non-random source, and then B, and analyze. I'm not sure what the argument is though. If something has an effect, there will be a correlation. Measuring the correlation may require modifying the system. We've known that measurement unavoidably affects the system under measurement for some time now. It's just a matter of degree.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      That correlation ought to be pretty quick to spot once you remove or turn off the control system. The control system in your example sounds binary, so on / off sounds like the only input (to the control system) to correlate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - privong 7y ago
    See Milton Friedman's Thermostat: https://themonkeycage.org/2012/07/milton-friedmans-thermostat/ https://themonkeycage.org/2012/07/milton-friedmans-thermosta...
gervu 7y ago
That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up. Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables. (It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.) You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  It’s probably a little of both. Remember Nextel? For a long time push to talk wasn’t interceptable by the police. Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.
  - close04 7y ago
    > about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods. It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.
- tim333 7y ago
  There are probably discussion sites not dissimilar to this one where people who are into stolen credit cards and the like hang out to swap notes. It would only really take one person to post - hey check out this new thing - for a few to try it. I was a victim of a vaguely similar thing - having a squatter in my flat in Spain which went from something that didn't really happen to loads of them all of a sudden because someone put up a how to guide on the internet.
caf 7y ago
The "background checks" were probably excluding a lot of low-hanging fruit, like attempts at creating accounts in fake names with stolen credit card details.
- rtpg 7y ago
  Hell, a background check will pull up people with earlier criminal convictions (which, given our prison systems generation of recidivism is probably an unfair filter but one that rules out a lot of people in organized crime)
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    Isn't recidivism the kind of filter that causes people to become recidivist, though?
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that the school-to-prison pipeline is so profitable for private business. The younger you put the “Mark of Cain” on a citizen, the sooner they become a revenue opportunity.
segmondy 7y ago
real background checks tied to the real person. without background check, then you can't tell if someone used a stolen credit card or if it's the real person.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft. No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives. In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.
ryanlol 7y ago
>damning evidence I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.
sytelus 7y ago
I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?
- Blackstone4 7y ago
  On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform. Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars. As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    There was a story a few years ago about someone renting an AirBnB to run a meth lab
- rickyc091 7y ago
  As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin, google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes, you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof. 80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new. While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places, in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves. We should investigate and understand these forces better and reuse them in other gig economy scenarios.

dvdbloc 7y ago

Correlation does not imply causation

orev 7y ago
You can’t have causation without correlation.
- anonthrowaway2 7y ago
  You definitely can. A control system causes a signal to be ~constant and thus ~uncorrelated to whatever you care to name.
  - whytaka 7y ago
    But there’d be another variable that is correlated.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    If a control system's output is uncorrelated with what it is controlling, then it's not really controlling it. Also, to see a clear linear correlation, you might need to know what you're looking for. A controller output may look uncorrelated with the target system state, until you realize it's a I controller, so you need to look for correlation between controller's output and the integral of the system's state.
    - DougBTX 7y ago
      Let’s say there is a system that controls whether a second system receives input from random source A or random source B, and there is some difference in the distribution of values generated from each source. Starting without knowing the relationship between the two systems, is there a good general approach that could pick out what it is doing?
      - barrkel 7y ago
        Replace the system with one that chooses A only; replace it with one that chooses B only; analyze distributions; analyze original system. Or replace A with known non-random source, and then B, and analyze. I'm not sure what the argument is though. If something has an effect, there will be a correlation. Measuring the correlation may require modifying the system. We've known that measurement unavoidably affects the system under measurement for some time now. It's just a matter of degree.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    That correlation ought to be pretty quick to spot once you remove or turn off the control system. The control system in your example sounds binary, so on / off sounds like the only input (to the control system) to correlate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- privong 7y ago
  See Milton Friedman's Thermostat: https://themonkeycage.org/2012/07/milton-friedmans-thermostat/ https://themonkeycage.org/2012/07/milton-friedmans-thermosta...

gervu 7y ago

That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up. Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables. (It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.) You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.

Spooky23 7y ago
It’s probably a little of both. Remember Nextel? For a long time push to talk wasn’t interceptable by the police. Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.
- close04 7y ago
  > about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods. It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.
tim333 7y ago
There are probably discussion sites not dissimilar to this one where people who are into stolen credit cards and the like hang out to swap notes. It would only really take one person to post - hey check out this new thing - for a few to try it. I was a victim of a vaguely similar thing - having a squatter in my flat in Spain which went from something that didn't really happen to loads of them all of a sudden because someone put up a how to guide on the internet.

caf 7y ago

The "background checks" were probably excluding a lot of low-hanging fruit, like attempts at creating accounts in fake names with stolen credit card details.

rtpg 7y ago
Hell, a background check will pull up people with earlier criminal convictions (which, given our prison systems generation of recidivism is probably an unfair filter but one that rules out a lot of people in organized crime)
- pasabagi 7y ago
  Isn't recidivism the kind of filter that causes people to become recidivist, though?
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that the school-to-prison pipeline is so profitable for private business. The younger you put the “Mark of Cain” on a citizen, the sooner they become a revenue opportunity.

segmondy 7y ago

real background checks tied to the real person. without background check, then you can't tell if someone used a stolen credit card or if it's the real person.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft. No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives. In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.

ryanlol 7y ago

>damning evidence I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.

sytelus 7y ago

I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?

Blackstone4 7y ago
On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform. Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars. As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  There was a story a few years ago about someone renting an AirBnB to run a meth lab
rickyc091 7y ago
As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin, google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes, you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof. 80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new. While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.
- sytelus 7y ago
  I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places, in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves. We should investigate and understand these forces better and reuse them in other gig economy scenarios.