7 ms·
Stripe admits high error rate (0.1% false positives)
- DreamFlasher 3y agoI am surprised that this blog post went through legal including this detail (https://archive.md/ZD1zc https://archive.md/ZD1zc): In the next paragraph they write the fraud rate "on the order of 1 out of every 1,000 payments.", so their false positive rate is as high as the fraud rate.
- _0ffh 3y agoI wonder what makes false negatives so costly for them, that they're willing to accept so many false positives.
- jacquesm 3y agoChargebacks are very costly, and it isn't all that high a false positive rate at all given what they are doing (processing payments). In fact some of their competitors would be very happy with that rate.
- goodcanadian 3y agoA false positive costs them nothing but the fees on a single transaction. A false negative costs the entire value of the transaction plus legal and administrative costs.
- jacquesm 3y agoAnd possibly their merchant account if there are enough of those.
- lechacker 3y agoReputation. Have you not seen that post that pops up every three months or so about how some startup had their funds "stolen" (whether true or not) by Stripe?
- _0ffh 3y agoI would have thought, those are the result of false positives, i.e. when fraud is "detected" where there (at least allegedly) is none.
- jacquesm 3y agoI would be very careful interpreting those stories without having more than just one side.
- xtiansimon 3y agoThe post is about a project called Radar. Do you believe this is what is responsible for those complaints?
- actionfromafar 3y ago0.1% of Stripe blog posts don't go through legal.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat is definitely not the title of the original article.
- samwillis 3y agoThis is a horribly editorialised title. In my view (as a e-commerce store owner) a false positive rate detecting fraud across their whole network of only 0.1% is very very low. If I'm reading it right, that's 1 in 1k blocked transactions are incorrect, not 1 in 1k all transactions! > The challenge is compounded by the fact that fraud is rare—on the order of 1 out of every 1,000 payments. So 0.1% of 0.1% (0.001%) of transactions are incorrectly blocked.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, but that sentence could have been worded much more clearly.
- joebiden2 3y agoThe article says (2nd paragraph, last sentence): > Out of the billions of legitimate payments made on Stripe, Radar incorrectly blocks just 0.1%. I seem to parse this differently, to me it reads as if 1 out of 1000 transactions are incorrectly flagged. I am not a native speaker though. Could you explain how you arrive at 0.1% of blocked transactions? I just saw your edit, but my question still stands.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe way I parse that is if a transaction is blocked the chance of it being an incorrect block is 0.1%. So out of 10000 transactions blocked 9990 would be correct blocks and 10 would be incorrect blocks. I agree it is confusing though. What is interesting is how they determine the incorrect blocks but the article doesn't really expand on that, it's just about one aspect of their fraud detection pipeline.
- someweirdperson 3y agoI'm missing some information how they count incorrectly blocked. If something fails for unexplainable reasons, as a user I simply switch to a different payment method or a different supplier.
- 3y ago
- mqus 3y ago> Out of the billions of legitimate payments made on Stripe, Radar incorrectly blocks just 0.1%. Or rephrased: "Stripe wrongly blocked millions of payments." What a headline! Let's see which news outlet will use it.
- lee101 3y ago[dead]