Know your data 49: the risk of story-telling with data

This ArsTechnica story (link) will continue to recur so long as most of us, especially those of us in the U.S., ignore the forever expansion of surveillance state. A man was arrested and falsely accused of luring a child at a McDonald's, based on an erroneous result of a facial recognition software widely used by local police in the U.S. It turned out the man lives more than 300 miles away from that McDonald's, and has never even been to that town. Nevertheless, the police obtained an arrest warrant, took the man into custody, and the man required legal assistance to "prove his innocence," a perverse reversal of our legal doctrine of innocent-until-proven-guilty.The story was excellently written, as it covers several ingredients that contribute to these wrongful arrests. Data by themselves are not sufficient to do harm. The blame goes beyond the facial recognition company's practice of assembling images of Americans, 40 million and counting. It's also that the facial recognition…