6.11 Digital Policing
117
based—intentionally or not—on racial profiling, suppressing migrants and other
minorities.
This is partly because predictive policing is not accurate, even though a lot of data
is being evaluated. However, even when using Big Data, there are errors of first and
second kind, i.e. false alarms and alarms that do not go off. If the police wants to have
a sensitive algorithm that misses out on very few suspects only, the result will be a
lot of false alarms, i.e. lists with millions of suspects, who are actually innocent. In
fact, in predictive policing applications the rate of false alarms is often above 90%.
53
This requires a lot of manual postprocessing, to remove false positives, i.e. probably
innocent suspects. There is obviously a lot of arbitrariness involved in this manual
cleaning—and hence the risk of applying discriminatory procedures.
I should perhaps add that “contact tracing” might be also counted among the digital
policing approaches—depending on how a society treats people suspected to have
an infection. In countries such as Israel, in order to identify infected persons it was
decided to apply software, originally developed to hunt down terrorists. This means
that infected people were treated almost like terrorists, which raised serious concerns.
In particular, it turned out that such military-style contact tracing is not as accurate
as expected. Apparently, the software overlooks more than 70% of all infections.
54
It has also been found that thousands of people were kept in quarantine, while they
were actually healthy.
55 So, it seems that public measures to fight COVID-19 have
been misused to put certain kinds of people illegitimately under house arrest. This is
quite worrying. Are we seeing here the emergence of a police state 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0?
6.12 Cashless Society
The “cashless society” is another vision of how future societies may be organized.
Promoters of this idea argue with fighting corruption, easier taxation, and increased
hygiene (it would supposedly reduce the spread of harmful diseases such as COVID19).
At first, creating a cashless society sounds like a good and comfortable idea, but it
is often connected with the concept of providing a “digital ID” to people. Sometimes,
it is even proposed “for security reasons” to provide people with an RFID chip in
their hand or make their identity machine readable with a personalized vaccine. This
53 Überwachung von Flugpassagieren liefert Fehler über Fehler, Süddeutsche Zeitung (April
24, 2019) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/fluggastdaten-bka-falschtreffer-1.4419760; 100,000
false positives for every real terrorist: Why anti-terror algorithms don’t work, First Monday (2017)
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/7126/6522.
54 Zweite Welle im Vorzeigeland—was wir von Israel lernen können, WELT (July 8,
2020) https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article211232079/Israel-Warum-im-Vorzeigeland-jetztwieder-ein-Lockdown-droht.html.
55 12,000 Israelis mistakenly quarantined by Shin Bet’s tracking system, The Jerusalem Post
(July 15, 2020) https://www.jpost.com/cybertech/12000-israelis-mistakenly-quarantined-by-shinbets-tracking-system-635154.
117
based—intentionally or not—on racial profiling, suppressing migrants and other
minorities.
This is partly because predictive policing is not accurate, even though a lot of data
is being evaluated. However, even when using Big Data, there are errors of first and
second kind, i.e. false alarms and alarms that do not go off. If the police wants to have
a sensitive algorithm that misses out on very few suspects only, the result will be a
lot of false alarms, i.e. lists with millions of suspects, who are actually innocent. In
fact, in predictive policing applications the rate of false alarms is often above 90%.
53
This requires a lot of manual postprocessing, to remove false positives, i.e. probably
innocent suspects. There is obviously a lot of arbitrariness involved in this manual
cleaning—and hence the risk of applying discriminatory procedures.
I should perhaps add that “contact tracing” might be also counted among the digital
policing approaches—depending on how a society treats people suspected to have
an infection. In countries such as Israel, in order to identify infected persons it was
decided to apply software, originally developed to hunt down terrorists. This means
that infected people were treated almost like terrorists, which raised serious concerns.
In particular, it turned out that such military-style contact tracing is not as accurate
as expected. Apparently, the software overlooks more than 70% of all infections.
54
It has also been found that thousands of people were kept in quarantine, while they
were actually healthy.
55 So, it seems that public measures to fight COVID-19 have
been misused to put certain kinds of people illegitimately under house arrest. This is
quite worrying. Are we seeing here the emergence of a police state 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0?
6.12 Cashless Society
The “cashless society” is another vision of how future societies may be organized.
Promoters of this idea argue with fighting corruption, easier taxation, and increased
hygiene (it would supposedly reduce the spread of harmful diseases such as COVID19).
At first, creating a cashless society sounds like a good and comfortable idea, but it
is often connected with the concept of providing a “digital ID” to people. Sometimes,
it is even proposed “for security reasons” to provide people with an RFID chip in
their hand or make their identity machine readable with a personalized vaccine. This
53 Überwachung von Flugpassagieren liefert Fehler über Fehler, Süddeutsche Zeitung (April
24, 2019) https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/fluggastdaten-bka-falschtreffer-1.4419760; 100,000
false positives for every real terrorist: Why anti-terror algorithms don’t work, First Monday (2017)
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/7126/6522.
54 Zweite Welle im Vorzeigeland—was wir von Israel lernen können, WELT (July 8,
2020) https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article211232079/Israel-Warum-im-Vorzeigeland-jetztwieder-ein-Lockdown-droht.html.
55 12,000 Israelis mistakenly quarantined by Shin Bet’s tracking system, The Jerusalem Post
(July 15, 2020) https://www.jpost.com/cybertech/12000-israelis-mistakenly-quarantined-by-shinbets-tracking-system-635154.