842 karma · joined February 20, 2009
The market for old DDR (East Germany) furniture here in Berlin is a bit crazy. Old cheap poor quality furniture (all MDF) selling for loads because it looks good on Instagram.
I know a guy that goes to house clearance sales in random places in East Germany, then brings pieces back to sell to hipsters in Berlin. Like me.
On the data: these are public citizen-lead efforts to crowd-source the names of the missing - hosted on websites and spreadsheets. There is no official verification process behind the individual entries, which is part of why the duplicate problem existed in the first place.
An issue we have now realised is "bad actors" trying to access the data...
Happy to answer anything - methodology, false positives, data handling, whatever.
That might be quite an interesting identity resolution challenge (disclosure: I build identity resolution tech).
I would not mind taking a look. Always interested to see how others are handling such data.
We built this while working at a European credit bureau, where we needed to deduplicate and match millions of monthly record updates from various sources. Traditional approaches using graph databases and Spark couldn't handle the scale, so we built our own solution using AWS Serverless.
Each identity is stored as an individual graph structure, using rules-based and ML matching. Performance: <300ms ingest (tested to 5,000/sec), <150ms search regardless of graph size. Several fintech companies use it for fraud detection, KYC, and customer 360.
Unlike vector databases which can blur similar entities together, IdentityRAG maintains distinct customer identities while pulling data from multiple systems - even when customer details differ across databases.
You can try it out with our sample chatbot in the Github repo (linked above). Free to sign up, we charge based on number of unified customer records (it is free for playing and testing). We would love to hear your comments and questions.
There is also a demo video in the repo and you can find more details about us here: https://tilores.io/
Yes I know we can register a UG, but in the end you don't. And it is not just the share capital that is annoying it is everything else.
It literally costs 10x more to do the bookkeeping for a German company vs a UK one. Plus getting investors is much more difficult because of the notary requirements.
We used a SPV for our first round, but even that is annoying. I had some angel investors pull out purely because we are a German GmbH.
https://tilosearch.com/ is when prompted people to ask us about RAG
Indeed there is certainly not mass voter fraud. We were glad not to find that, but tbh surprised that we found any at all. Originally we were only going to look for duplicate profiles - it didn't even occur to us to look for actual fraud.
But why not make it a complete non-issue? It would be so easy to fix this data so there were no duplicates, then there would not even be any accusations like there were in 2020.
What I want to create is complete trust in the data to avoid the... bickering later.
/edit - as the poster below mentions, the 61 were just the ones that were manually confirmed. There were 1000 potential cases.
I suspect the data in the UK (where I originate) would be pretty messy. The voting lists there are a free for all, I reckon!
Similarly, there are a lot of false negatives where we know two records should match, but we could not because that would require a rule that would create more false positives.
In the end, it was the best we could do with the public view of the data. If we were working with the data Companies House actually holds itself, it would of course be much better.
Let me know if you are ever in Berlin and we can meet up again!
Also, this type of user is not making deletion requests - they are deleting and then immediately reinstalling the app to appear "fresh".
We actually did not want to humiliate him, and believe me we had the opportunity, because we did not want to "push him over the edge". I kinda hope he has kept his job so he can try to get help and stop himself doing this again.
In Scotland I do not really have the same fear. Not sure I would do the same thing in Glasgow or London, but still, we are not idiots, we were not going to take any crazy risks but we figured the risk to us was worth it to stop the risk to our sister. We weighed the risks up.
iirc they knew we had video, but the video of the car vandalism was never going to be enough to do anything. They had not seen that specific video. In the end it was only a small part of the evidence package.