Several reports are circulating (e.g., via /.) of a court case in New Jersey in which the defendant won the right to audit proprietary genetic testing software for errors or potential sources of bias. It being a murder trial, this is about as close to a life-or-death use-case as possible.

Given the stakes, it is understandable that a low-trust standard should prevail in  forensic matters, rendering an audit indispensable (nor is the firm’s “complexity defence” anything short of untenable). What is surprising, rather, is how long it took to obtain this type of judicial precedent. The authoritativeness deficit of algorithms is a topic of burning intensity generally; that in such a failure-critical area a business model based on proprietary secrecy has managed to survive is truly remarkable. It is safe to say that this challenge will hardly be the last. Ultimately, freely auditable software would seem to be the superior systemic answer for this type of applications.