Massacre Data Arrives a Day Late – WSJ

Longtime readers will sigh. I ve made similar points after half a dozen domestic terrorist-style events from Las Vegas and suburban Denver to a congressional ballfield in suburban D.C. Red flags, police calls and electronic hints and giveaways were always conspicuous in hindsight. A decade ago it was plausible to argue, as some did, that algorithms would be too slow to yield relevant patterns and would cough up too many false positives. However, throwing away a decade is hardly a way to make progress on these challenges.

The real stumbling block is privacy risk. Privacy risk, let us notice, resides in who can see the data, not whether it exists, and in when and how it might be permissible to tie a potentially significant pattern to a named individual.

In 2017 researchers from Columbia University and Microsoft showed that the queries of individual search-engine users could yield recognizable patterns connecting nonspecific symptom searches with later searches suggesting the user had received a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Of course, because researchers couldn t identify the individuals involved, they couldn t ask whether any had actually received such a diagnosis nor could they put their insight to work helping real patients get earlier diagnosis of a disease that is often diagnosed too late to help.

That s the privacy hurdle. A plausible solution would be wrapping the whole puzzle in a specialized legal process: The algorithms would be allowed to do their job; a judge s permission would be required before a named person could be linked to an observed pattern so government officials could take steps. The opportunity exists whether we choose to take advantage of it or not, but history suggests that sooner or later we will take advantage of it.

via www.wsj.com

Holman Jenkins.