A Stitch in Haste

Wired has a a good op-ed piece by a private data-miner on how massive government data-mining of the sort advocated by Richard Posner simply cannot work as a matter of technological and statistical fact.

Much of the number-crunching goes over my head (if I want to hear about "trillions," then I'll stick to the federal budget or the national debt). But this part deserves emphasis:

Data mining works best when you're searching for a well-defined profile, a reasonable number of attacks per year and a low cost of false alarms. Credit-card fraud is one of data mining's success stories: all credit-card companies mine their transaction databases for data for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card.

Many credit-card thieves share a pattern ... and data mining systems can minimize the losses in many cases by shutting down the card. In addition, the cost of false alarms is only a phone call to the cardholder asking him to verify a couple of purchases. The cardholders don't even resent these phone calls -- as long as they're infrequent -- so the cost is just a few minutes of operator time.

True, but there's also another point underlying this observation: having a credit card is a voluntary act. If I don't want my purchases or other personal information to be data mined, then I can simply pay by cash whenever possible. Government data mining is by definition involuntary; there of course cannot be an "opt-out" provision.

So the questions of effectiveness, efficiency and efficacy are all well and good, especially for those of us opposed to government data-mining, but let's not lose sight of the far more fundamental reason to oppose such programs, whether they work or not: because they are an unacceptably intrusive infringement of our privacy.

It's quite simple really:

"costs too high" + "benefits too low" = "not a good idea"