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Graph Databases for Crime-Fighting: How Memgraph Maps and Analyzes Criminal (memgraph.com)
13 points by taubek on Oct 14, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Don't fall for it. Such asssociation is going to have a high ratio of false positives to true positives, classifying numerous innocent people and users as criminals for no good reason, just because a graph said so. Objectivity is not to be found here.

For the citizen, this laziness is why metadata privacy matters, as via the SimpleX app and similar apps.

As for Memgraph, it is BSL licensed.


:point_up: this…

The article is purely a marketing piece. As we know with all tech, it’s how you hold it. Yes, you can certainly graph all the entities, activities & relationships - but there is the human tendency towards laziness, least path of resistance and the desire to show “look what I can do” that inevitably leads towards using using weak/garbage data without verification - often in the form of purchases/collected metadata.

Concrete example with a less scary outcome; I was involved in a project for real-estate marketing that used “quality” metadata to infer potential buyers/sellers/properties to target for a given marketing campaign and/or what marketing techniques/campaigns might influence a targeted entity. It was cool. For sure. But, due to the lack of integrity in the data, even with well known & trusted data (direct from the MLS) the result was a graph that made many very weak/inaccurate connections and resulted in a great deal of wasted marketing efforts/cost, targeting the wrong message to the wrong entity at the wrong time. Because it was still a major improvement over other tools in the space, it became the preferred path even with inaccuracies galore.

Now, imagine if the cost of inaccuracies is human freedom - vs wasted cents. Scary stuff.


Well said. Much of work is "look what I can do" without much regard to the quality of the results. Those who spend time taking a deeper look at correctness often just get chastized by bad management. The sectors where correctness is valued in software are few and far between.


Or mapping and analyzing an organization for infiltration or cyberattacks by criminals.




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