More for support than illumination
StatsChat has been mentioned again by National Business Review, though they attribute StatsChat to Stats New Zealand. They are using my post on cybercrime to attack the proposed internet anti-bullying laws. Personally, I’m not convinced my post supports their argument, but you can judge that for yourselves.
One thing I will point out: that $625 million cybercrime number that I criticized and that they are now disparaging? They used it in a headline as recently as June.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
To be fair, journalists are up against well-funded and powerful organisations that often make it nigh impossible to verify whatever facts and stats they present.
With tight internet deadlines and diminishing editorial budgets, there’s little time to delve into survey methodologies unfortunately.
Also, if you look at http://www.securitycentral.org.nz/, Netsafe’s claim that “cyber crime cost New New Zealanders an estimated $625 million last year” is backed by some real heavy-hitters:
Internal Affairs
Google
HP
McAfee
Microsoft
MED
MSN/NZ
NCSC
NZDF
NZ Police
Sophos
Symantec
Trade Me
NCSC is the National Cyber Security Centre which may or may not be named after its US Department of Homeland Security counterpart. You would think that such an organisation would be keen to have verified and true figures out there…
To give you another example, I’ve been covering the whole copyright three-strikes debate for a while now, and seen some striking figures not just being bandied about but also become part of the official canon and cited as the reason why we have to have harsh laws.
The figures seem impossible to verify however. I blogged about a recent RIANZ submission here http://juha.saarinen.org/8188
Now, the amount New Zealanders guilty of “P2P piracy” stuck out like a sore thumb – it’s actually 780,000 individuals per month. Not accounts, but 780,000 people who each apparently download song upon song and share them. About 19 people every minute, if calc.exe is correct.
comScore which did the survey using a panel of users (ahem, self-selection?) which may or may not have been in NZ, isn’t able to differentiate between legit and illegal P2P usage. Interesting extrapolation going on there that nobody seems to question, even though it’ll be used as part of regulations around criminal copyright enforcement.
12 years ago
It certainly can be hard for journalists to find the time to check numbers like this one.
I still find it striking that NBR now thinks the number is obviously wrong, when they were perfectly happy with it in June, and without admitting (or, perhaps, noticing) that they have changed their minds.
12 years ago