Is the term 'False Positive' a critical digital literacy?

A false positive is another way of saying ‘error’. As applied to the field of digital  programs, a false positive occurs when the program mistakenly flags an innocent file as being malicious or infected. This may seem harmless enough, but false positives can be a real nuisance and sometimes major problems if you are at a critical digital literacy disadvantage.

For example, from a digital computing perspective  a) you waste even more time and resources in futile attempts to disinfect ‘infected’ files b) you waste productivity due to user down-time.
c) you may take e-mail offline, as a security precaution, thus causing a backlog and more lost productivity.

In short, digital false positives can be costly nuisances.

Unfortunately, the term is not confined. It also applies, for example, to anti-spam protection, where it refers to the misidentification of a legitimate e-mail message as spam.  Since the undelivered e-mail may be a business critical message, this too could be very costly,

It can also apply to health and medical issues. For example, in a highly reported interview titled "Christina Applegate: MRI 'saved my life'" the following exchanged occured on the false positives in life threathening circumstances.

GUPTA: Most women, as you said, don’t know about MRIs with respect to screening for breast cancer.

APPLEGATE: Well it’s not talked about and I also think that you know, there’s also been a lot of talk that there’s all these false positives with MRIs but there are false positives with any kind of screening. Same with mammography – there is also a lot of false positives. They are not perfect science, unfortunately. But they’re learning more and more now that it’s, it’s an incredible way to screen for early detection.

GUPTA: One of the things I hear all the time as a doctor is that you doctors order too many tests – you’re ordering tests for everything. What do you say to people who say look we’re a culture of over-testing as it is? (Click here for the full interview)

What are your experiences with false positives? Do you agree its a critical digital literacy term to understand?

For some  interesting literture on the subject, please consider purchasing the following;