Which post? The original article at the Independent clearly describes the origin of the 98% figure, but it does not describe the statistic you’d actually need to calculate the true false positive rate, which is how many faces were screened to generate the 104 alerts, nor does it make any indication that the author even understands that fact. Cory’s post doesn’t even do that much – he just calls it a 98% false positive with no direct reference to the underlying figures, an assertion that it wholly false and enormously misleading. (I can only assume deliberately so, since Cory’s not stupid and has had this mistake pointed out already.)
Then we disagree. I find reporting the truth to be less misleading than doing otherwise. It took Ben fewer than 170 words to explain the maths with perfect clarity off the top oh his head; with two minutes effort a reporter who was genuinely interested in accurately presenting the information could get it down to 100.
Sure, and that would be a valid cause for extreme concern if the Met had falsely accused 102 people of their 104 hits, or even detained those 102 people. Oh, but they didn’t actually do that, despite Cory’s implication to the contrary. It would be cause for extreme concern if this were a system that had been widely adopted and blindly believed by its users, rather than a system currently being employed on a trial basis with careful civilian government oversight that currently deems it not fit for widespread use. Oh, but it’s not, and it is.
Police abuse of this technology, which clearly isn’t accurate enough to do what the police want it to do, would be a very large concern. If it were happening. But it’s not. Deliberately misrepresenting the accuracy of the technology and its current use only serve to undermine the argument against its broader deployment, and unnecessarily so, because there is already a perfectly good case against its use without resorting to deliberate misinformation.
