threat score

Programs that instantly assess your potential for violence based on your arrest history, social media posts, and other records. It refers to the police practice of creating a calculated number that reflects the level of risk in a person based on statistics, bio-statistics, econometrics and other related disciplines.

Historical perspective: According to the ACLU in 2016, "threat scores" are generated by a software called Beware, made by Intrado. A promotional pamphlet says the software’s purpose is "searching, sorting and scoring billions of commercial records” about individuals. It scours the internet for social media posts and website clicks and combines it with other information such as public records and key data elements from commercial providers. They claim this product is based on significant amounts of historical work in mathematical science, "decisioning science" and link analysis, and uses a comprehensive set of patent-pending algorithms that search, sort and score vast amounts of commercial records from the largest data mining companies in the industry.

Clearly there are several problems with threat scores including: scoring Americans in secret, inaccurate data, questionable effectiveness, unfairness and bias, potentially dangerous results, an unjustified government intrusion, First Amendment questions, and mission creep... who knows where big tech and the guvment will take this next, look at China's social scoring policy.