The Verifiers (The Verifiers #1)

by Jane Pek

In an Inspector Yuan mystery, here is where the chapter would close, along with a spoiler from the omniscient narrator: If they had only known how great the price of the truth would be, or something else comparably ominous.

She would hurl herself at the chance for a life where she could make things happen instead of one where things happened to her.

“These matchmakers are what the industry calls relationship-management companies. They use technology to help people find romantic partners. Like providing a digital platform for people to meet and using data to predict whether two people will be compatible.”

If this were a novel, he might simply be a poorly written character. But there are no poorly written people. Only ones you don’t yet understand.

“One almost has to admire a nation willing to commit such horrific acts for a nonalcoholic, bitter-tasting beverage.”

Finders Keepers is an app that can track a person’s movements through their cell phone.

when people sign up with a dating platform, they give their consent for the platform to, among other things, access their current location via GPS. That consent extends to allowing the matchmaker to share such information with third parties, such as Match Insights; and Match Insights can in turn grant its clients, such as Veracity, consent to access that information.

I suppose it’s all part of the deal we’ve struck with the tech companies. We’ve asked them for map apps to tell us where to go and ride-hailing apps to get us there, banking apps to pay our bills, meal-delivery apps to feed us, content-streaming apps to entertain us. Dating apps to find us love? In exchange we open up our lives to them so they can learn how to make even more money from us. It’s either Rousseau’s social contract rejiggered for the twenty-first century or Faust’s doomed attempt to get one over the devil.

One good thing about being a petite, soft-spoken Asian female is that nobody ever thinks you’ll do anything sketchy.

There are so many kinds of silence that can inhabit a room. This one feels ancient, like it’s always been here, woven gray into the carpet, lacquered into the walnut of the desk and the shelves, waiting for us to notice.

“It always surprises me,” says Komla, “how surprising death is, when it’s the one thing that’s inevitable.”

Now I see why Georges Simenon always describes Inspector Maigret trudging through hailstorms or biblical rains in whatever Podunk French town that’s the site of the latest murder. The right weather can do a lot for atmospherics.

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

believing something for its convenience is at best negligence and at worst culpability.

Lionel writes the kind of story you read in the New Yorker, where nothing happens but the characters are all thrumming with anguish.

Love as an engine that can power you off the edge of a cliff and across a chasm of dissimilarity to land, exhausted but exhilarated, on the other side.

Every murder mystery contains an illusion that the detective must dispel in order to solve the crime.

matching only fully succeeds if the dating platforms have access to accurate, complete information about the people on them. Problem is, people lie. All the time, especially on the Internet, and extra especially where anything with the potential for romance is concerned.

Precision: they work with the matchmakers to improve the accuracy of the algorithms. Veracity: we spotlight the instances where the algorithms fail, as in the case of Charretter. Romantick: unfortunately, I can’t think of what they would contribute beyond a rabid denunciation of the entire enterprise.

Now we enter the middle stage of the murder mystery. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked and sampled and discarded for being either under- or overripe. Enough brush has been cleared for the detective to see…well, at this point, more brush. But that’s fine, because hidden in there is the mistake that the villain has made, the definitive answer to every whodunnit. Every villain makes such a fatal mistake. The detective just has to find it.

SafeID, which utilizes AI and big data to monitor the risk of identity theft; Friend, which provides a personalized chatbot for lonesome people.

there’s a van waiting by the curb with the logo chefly printed along the sides. (I google it later—a start-up that sends Culinary Institute of America graduates to people’s premises to cook special-occasion meals for them.)

To take my own liberties with another Oscar Wilde quote: any number of men kill the thing they love.

Each person is assigned a score that rises if they behave like a good citizen in the eyes of the government, such as performing community service, and falls if they don’t, which constitutes anything from criticizing the Communist Party to misappropriating a handicapped seat on the train. If your score is high, you get treated well, including being eligible for additional government benefits. If your score is low, life becomes pretty crappy. According to Michael, the Western media has been primarily outraged by the extent of ongoing surveillance that the Chinese population is subject to, the system’s lack of transparency, the notion of a government policing its people’s lives. But that’s just phase one. By collecting all this data on its citizens’ prior acts, the Chinese government hopes to eventually build algorithms that can predict their future behavior. Rather than punishing someone for what they have done, the ideal would be for the initial infraction never to occur at all.

Companies collect incredible amounts of data on consumer behavior so they can predict how people will spend their money. And it sounds like these dating platforms are in a privileged position in that respect, because their users have an incentive to provide as much information about themselves as possible, to increase their chances of an accurate match.”

Our vendors’ algorithms preselect our choices and then tell us these are the things we want. Impossible to verify, since we can never know what they failed to show us, and so over time what they do present to us—what they want us to want—does indeed become what we want.

“The power to predict outcomes is inextricably linked to the power to control outcomes…and once you’ve achieved the former, it may be hard to resist trying the latter.”

we should be using data and technology to help us make better choices.”

You become something if you act that way for long enough.

The power to predict outcomes is inextricably linked to the power to control outcomes.

“When you put enough layers between yourself and another person, you’re able to forget what you’re actually doing.”

How to best use data to evaluate whether two people were likely to be romantically compatible, which in turn required determining both the accuracy and the relevance of such data.