MassPrivateI The World Privacy Forum report: ‘How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Your Future’ highlights the unexpected problems that arise from new types of predictive consumer scoring, which this report terms consumer scoring. Largely unregulated either by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, new consumer scores use thousands of pieces of information about consumers’ pasts to predict how they will behave in the future. Issues of secrecy, fairness of underlying factors, use of consumer information such as race and ethnicity in predictive scores, accuracy, and the uptake in both use and ubiquity of these scores are key areas of focus.
Developed in the 1950s, the credit score became part of consumer credit granting. The credit score was largely secret to the consumers that it scored and affected until 2000, when a long and well-documented history of unfair uses and abuses finally culminated in the credit score being made available to consumers. Eventually, public pressure caused the credit score’s use and even its underlying factors to become public.
The report includes a roster of the types of consumer data used in predictive consumer scores today, as well as a roster of the consumer scores such as health risk scores, consumer prominence scores, identity and fraud scores, summarized credit statistics, among others. The report reviews the history of the credit score – which was secret for decades until legislation mandated consumer access — and urges close examination of new consumer scores for fairness and transparency in their factors, methods, and accessibility to consumers.
The most salient feature of modern consumer scores is the scores are typically secret in
some way. The existence of the score itself, its uses, the underlying factors, data sources,
or even the score range may be hidden. Consumer scores with secret factors, secret sources, and secret algorithms can be obnoxious, unaccountable, untrustworthy, and unauditable. Secret scores can be wrong, but no one may be able to find out that they are wrong or what the truth is. Secret scores can hide discrimination, unfairness, and bias. Trade secrets have a place, but secrecy that hides racism, denies due process, undermines privacy rights, or prevents justice does not belong anywhere.
Predictive consumer scores are important because they affect the lives, privacy, and wellbeing of individuals. Many people know about credit scores, but few know about the broader range of new consumer scores. Consumer scores are already abundant and are in active use. Consumer scores are not just an online phenomenon. Consumer scores are found in a wide array of “offline” arenas, including businesses, health care providers, financial institutions, law enforcement, retail stores, federal and state government, and many other locations. Some social consumer scores may have online applications, but mostly, consumer scores are not solely focused on just online activities. And unlike credit scores, consumer scores remain largely secret and unregulated.
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/WPF_Scoring_of_America_April2014_fs.pdf
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-secret-consumer-scores-threaten-our.html