First Wap’s flagship product is called Altamides, it can track any phone anywhere in the world without leaving a trace - at an enormous scale. The dataset I found contained 1.5 million rows of tracking data from Altamides, including phone numbers, dates and real locations.

At the center of it all, the company First Wap. Hidden behind hideous 2000s web design is a ruthless surveillance pioneer that has operated in the shadows for more than two decades.

That doesn’t stop the agency from blasting its fraud estimates out to the public this week. Nor does it stop the Swedish media regurgitating it, albeit now with a little asterisk section at the bottom citing our reporting :)

This 2 day threshold has large ramifications for its fraud estimates. If you set the threshold at 4 days the estimate of “fraud” would drop dramatically.

One of my faves

That’s because Försäkringskassan's fairness procedure allows, for example, 4 immigrants to be selected for every Swede without having to test if this is at all justified. Even if the model fails these 'generous' thresholds there’s an escape hatch: It's okay if legal says it's okay

We sent 100s of emails, 12s of FOIs, 2x in court. Försäkringskassan refused to answer the most basic questions arguing baselessly that it would allow fraudsters to game the system

I do a lot of FOIA and I’m used to stonewalling. But Sweden surprised me. After 3 years of telling me no, a high level official at Sweden’s welfare agency Försäkringskassan accidentally left me on cc, writing “Now we must hope that we are done with him.”

Another month another AI risk assessment story