Personally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man problem.
The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy.
At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?
That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen).
One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road.
Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).
> At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?
that's a "strawman" as well. Every law is oppression, the real question is what degree of oppression is justified for the good of society
I think accuracy is worth discussing, because even a 99% accurate system can produce poor results if the signal it's searching for is rare. Wikipedia has some good examples about this.
One of the examples is about terrorism, with 100 out of 1 million people being terrorists and a 99% accurate system. Being 99 percent accurate, 99 out of the 100 terrorists will trigger the alarm, but so will about 9,999 law abiding citizens. Given an individual that triggered the alarm, there's a less than 1% chance they're actually a terrorist.
The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy.
At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening?
That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen).
One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road.
Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).