In the movie Minor­ity Report, based on the short story The Minor­ity Report by Philip K. Dick, a spe­cial­ized police depart­ment appre­hends crim­i­nals before they even break the law. Three psy­chics called “pre­cogs”, mutated humans with pre­cog­ni­tion abil­i­ties, gen­er­ate future visions which allow the spe­cial police unit “Pre­crime” to take the future crim­i­nals into cus­tody even before they them­selves know that they will break the law. As such the movie heav­ily touches the philo­sophic ques­tions sur­round­ing fore­knowl­edge and free will vs. deter­min­ism.

Now, sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­sity of Darm­stadt have devel­oped a sim­i­lar sys­tem called DyR­iAS. This acronym stands for Dynamis­che Risiko Analyse Sys­tem (Dynamic Risk Anal­y­sis System). Allegedly, the soft­ware could have accu­rately pre­dicted every known ram­page in the US or Ger­many, accord­ing to Dr. Jens Hoff­man. As far as I under­stand, the pro­gram should be used by the police, school psy­chol­o­gists, teach­ers and sim­i­lar per­son­nel. The user has to anser ques­tions and the pro­gram will pro­vide the user with a pro­file. There are 32 known fac­tors that indi­cate a higher risk of a per­son going postal and DyR­iAS will check the answers against these factors.

Since March 2009 the sys­tem is being tested in a few schools in Ger­many. Addi­tion­ally, it is being tested by the Swiss police in Zurich. There are plans for fur­ther ver­sions of the pro­gram, espe­cially for mar­i­tal vio­lence and stalk­ing. Accord­ing to Dr. Hoff­man, this pro­gram is only intended for use with con­spic­uos per­sons. DyR­iAS can only be fed with anonymized data, no per­sonal data will be stored.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I admit to being a pes­simist so I don’t have any qualms what­so­ever to pre­dict­ing that after this piece of soft­ware has been estab­lished in our soci­ety it will be improved and it will get used in more sit­u­a­tions. Peo­ple will be tested when apply­ing for a new job, for instance. Sure, every­thing is fine, isn’t it? Nei­ther of us wants wo work with a sociopath who might go postal at any moment. I can appre­ci­ate that thought. But what if you’re not totally in the clear? Will you be flagged as a poten­tial risk? What’s more impor­tant: Will it stick? I don’t believe in data pri­vacy. It’s nice to have, it’s worth to fight for, but it is, ulti­mately, not to be taken for granted. Peo­ple still stick to the thought that knowl­edge is power with­out real­is­ing that knowl­edge is only pow­er­ful if you know why that is.

Any­way, never mind. DyR­iAS isn’t used for appre­hend­ing a poten­tial crim­i­nal. Yet.