Crisp Thinking announced today that its community management platform will be used by Jabble, a new children's social networking site. Says Crisp Thinking:
"The technology has an independently tested accuracy rating of 98.4 per cent by Cambridge University in the UK in the detection of online predators. It uses a combination of machine learning heuristics to detect long-term behaviours, concept analysis, filtering technology and reputation analysis to help keep children safe online. The Platform operates in multi-languages and ensures communities, social networks and online games remains COPPA compliant."
The url for Jabble is www.jabble.co.uk
Posted by: CrispThinking | Apr 11, 2011 at 11:04
Corrected. Sorry.
Posted by: ecastronova | Apr 11, 2011 at 12:37
A note of caution: What do they mean by "accuracy rating of 98.4" and how did they measure that?
Also remember what that accuracy rating means. A 98.4% accuracy equates to a 1.6% error rate. Say I have a population that consists of 100,000 regular users and 1,000 predators. Thus, approximately 1% of users are predators.
A 1.6% error rate means we'll catch 984 predators, and we'll miss 16. Actually not bad.
However we'll also mis-identify 1,600 regular users as predators. More regular users are falsely labeled than predators caught. The numbers get worse as the proportion shifts. If the non-predator population is 1,000,000 then the false-positive number rises to 16,000, totally swamping the real positives.
Mike.
Posted by: NoAstronomer | Apr 11, 2011 at 15:56
lol a/s/l?
Warning: this post has been flagged as a potential predator!
Posted by: Brian 'Psychochild' Green | Apr 12, 2011 at 13:41
Damn! I knew I should have lied about my age on that signup form!
Posted by: Brian 'Psychochild' Green | Apr 12, 2011 at 13:42
98.4 per cent is a serious number. If you make a bold statement like 'we keep your children safe', you either do it or face the wrath of unhappy parents..
Posted by: weirdnews | Apr 13, 2011 at 19:28
>"The technology has an independently tested accuracy rating of 98.4 per cent by Cambridge University in the UK in the detection of online predators."
So where did "Cambridge University" get these online predators from, so they could test whether or not the software picked up their grooming attempts? I had a look at the Crisp Thinking site but couldn't find any links to the research, just the figure of 98.4% . For all I know, some second-year undergraduate could have typed 62 lines that they thought a groomer might use and one of them didn't get caught by the software. On the other hand, there could have been a major survey using police transcripts of actual grooming sessions and they caught the activity 98.4% of the time with no false positives.
I realise that on a web site they're not necessarily going to publish the research, but if I were going to use their system I'd want to see it.
Richard
Posted by: Richard | Apr 15, 2011 at 05:27
I agree with Richard, 98.4% is an awful specific number for a rather unspecific test. The testing methodology is also not known and why it caught certain "people". Security systems rely on their effectiveness through quality, not secrecy.
Posted by: Lee Delarm | Apr 21, 2011 at 11:42
Thats an incredibly high level of accuracty, but how many of those people who are gauged as being preditory in their online activities are. When it comes to the safety of our children any possible help we can get is worth the few who will inevitably be wrongly labelled.
Jean Smith
Mediation Researcher
Posted by: Mediationprocess | Jul 09, 2011 at 15:04