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I think the library warranty thing depends. If the government wants to find out who checked out the Communist Manifesto so they can jail them for thought crime

I think the library warranty thing depends. If the government wants to find out who checked out the Communist Manifesto so they can jail them for thought crime - that's bad. If the police want to know who checked out this specific copy of Harry Potter because they found it at the scene of a murder, that's good. Sure, I might've just dropped my copy of Harry Potter near a murder as I innocently passed by. And yeah, I might've been looking up the victim's name and address in Google purely out of curiosity right before they got murdered. Neither the Google search nor the book are dispositive but they fit into a broader context which could be used to convict or exonerate me. Ultimately we need laws or judges to set reasonable limits on powers that could be used for good to make sure they aren't also overused for ill.

perl4ever 5y ago
There's an in between situation where someone is looking for correlations with a crime, but they are simply searching so much data, that they inevitably get a huge number of very close, but invalid matches. This tends to be a problem more and more with ever increasing databases that are convenient to access. People have intuitions for coincidences that are not appropriate for vast amounts of data.
- framecowbird 5y ago
  This is a really great insight, and demonstrates where the "library book" example is lacking. Since Google is so vast, I can find a page of search hits to support any particular belief I might have, no matter how wild.
- 542354234235 5y ago
  Things like this make me think of the movie Gattaca. Mild Spoilers After the murder, they just go around vacuuming up any and all organic material to test for DNA. They get a hit from someone who “isn’t supposed to be there” and immediately focus the entire investigation on that person. It fits the very real pattern of using science to just confirm the human biases held by the people using it. If police can sweep up and search through a mountain of data, it is going to be the Muslim immigrant hit they focus on over the white middle manager. It will be the person struggling off and on with homelessness that gets arrested because they matched a pattern and didn’t have an alibi, over the suburban mom. That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.

perl4ever 5y ago

There's an in between situation where someone is looking for correlations with a crime, but they are simply searching so much data, that they inevitably get a huge number of very close, but invalid matches. This tends to be a problem more and more with ever increasing databases that are convenient to access. People have intuitions for coincidences that are not appropriate for vast amounts of data.

framecowbird 5y ago
This is a really great insight, and demonstrates where the "library book" example is lacking. Since Google is so vast, I can find a page of search hits to support any particular belief I might have, no matter how wild.
542354234235 5y ago
Things like this make me think of the movie Gattaca. Mild Spoilers After the murder, they just go around vacuuming up any and all organic material to test for DNA. They get a hit from someone who “isn’t supposed to be there” and immediately focus the entire investigation on that person. It fits the very real pattern of using science to just confirm the human biases held by the people using it. If police can sweep up and search through a mountain of data, it is going to be the Muslim immigrant hit they focus on over the white middle manager. It will be the person struggling off and on with homelessness that gets arrested because they matched a pattern and didn’t have an alibi, over the suburban mom. That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.