Paypal Does it Again

Re:Paypal Does it Again by ericd on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @03:46AM (#3697424)

Many times, when dealing with fraud, the damage done by a false negative completely outweighs the damage done by a false positive. This is almost always the case for the company, in some cases it's also true for other users involved. Thus, companies are frequently OK with having a high false positive rate in order to get the false negative rate to be close to zero.

The company obviously realizes it has a large number of false positives, and it's probably decided that it's worth it.

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Re:Paypal Does it Again by swombat on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @09:05AM (#3698196)

There's nothing wrong with deliberately having a high false positive rate. Airport security does that too. The problem is if you treat everyone who gets flagged up as irredeemably guilty even though you know you have a self-positive rate.

This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal.

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Re:Paypal Does it Again by ericd on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @08:16PM (#3701039)

Very true, they definitely should dig a bit into their margins to provide a method of appealing the decision - I think it would actually help them quite a lot on the PR front, so it might be good even from a bottom line perspective.

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Re:Paypal Does it Again by JadeNB on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @02:31PM (#3699696)

> This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal.

Not so loud, TSA will hear you.

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