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Predictive policing: Don’t even think about it (economist.com)
18 points by digisth on July 26, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



Statistical analysis to figure the optimal use of police resources is a great idea, particularly to prevent violent crime and theft in public areas.

What concerns me, however, is the idea of predictive analytics being used on the vast databases collected by NSA/GCHQ (there's no reason to suspect they're not doing this already). Such a system of "pre-crime" would be bound to have false positives, and suddenly based on your Google searches, movie preferences, musical tastes, friendships, or who knows what, the state decides that you are a "person of interest".


Woah! I'm the technical founder of this company and I hadn't even seen this article yet. Pretty surreal to see it on hacker news.




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