The Witch Hunt Algorithm

Ivonne Jansen-Dings
Nov 6 · 3 min read
Image by Brendan Adkins

And there it is, the algorithm to beat all algorithms. The one that will help solve one of societies most heinous crimes. That will make our children safer and will root out the source of every parent’s worst nightmare. The Zero Abuse project in America is a foundation creating a system that can detect institutional patterns which indicate child molestation. Using the Catholic Church dataset detailing processes for identifying child abusers among their ranks, they claim to be able to detect new cases. Cases that have not been made public. In order to force institutional changes and give new leads for law enforcement to pursue.

Who could oppose such a noble goal? Who would argue against detecting child molesters in society and making our communities safer? And yet… I am listening to Joelle Casteix speak passionately about her cause and her commitment to making institutions, and offenders, accountable for potentially covering up incidents. And I can’t help wondering who will hold their foundation accountable for their actions.

Sure, I believe that technology, like an algorithm, can learn to assess documented behaviours in uniform datasets (like perhaps the Catholic Church one). And show discrepancies and similarities and patterns that occur. However the whole premiss of the Zero Abuse project for me is the encapsulation of ‘the trolley problem’. I just don’t see a ‘right’ outcome. This project will encounter so many ethical questions, for which the answers are opaque. And which can easily lead to ‘unwanted’ outcomes fed by misconceptions and the human tendency not to understand statistical probability.

The Zero Abuse project is working together with a top law firm to attempt to answer some of my concerns, that they also are not blind to. The fact that they are generating a list of names with a ‘abuse score’ next to it is by far the most obvious one. They offer bylaws and other legal mechanism to ensure that this information will not go public. However it will be shared with law enforcement when this is called for. And be made public in aggregated ways (f.i. village x has an unusual high amount of potential activity in a certain time period).

Now there’s a reason for a witch hunt, if ever there was one. Give any community information about potential child abusers in their area and speculation will go wild. Add some algorithmic (un)certainty around times and institutions like schools or churches and we can all guess what will happen. I also find it hard to believe a simple ‘we will secure the data and not share it’ is enough to actually guarantee this dataset to remain safe. It will most like be under constant attack of hackers trying to gain access. And also be a target for political action, demanding information to be made public — for public safety.

This is the kind of dataset and algorithm that give me pause. One might argue that privacy of an individual needs to give way to a certain extent, in order to identify and punish child abusers in our society. And one might be right. But I question if this type of profiling by an independent organisation like Zero Abuse is the right way to go. They might be a foundation, but there are no checks and balances in place to make sure they handle their data in the right way. For me only a democratically controlled entity should be able to make such assessment, and only under heavy supervision by regulatory bodies and heavy scrutiny of the public ones.

For me this example show how urgently we need new legislation and new policies in the digital age. Like any fundamental societal revolution we need new ways to govern all the changes that are happening. The digital world will not regulate itself. Even with the best of intentions the pitfalls for digital initiatives are too many. There are steps the Zero Abuse project can take to start tackling some of the direct issues at hand. But there are no instruments, no bodies to structure ideas and innovations likes theirs around. And there need to be. Soon.

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