We are delighted that our 2014 report, The Scoring of America , was discussed in the New York Times over the weekend. The Scoring of America was the first major report to discuss, analyze, and rigorously document the secret scores that determine many key aspects of Americans' financial, educational, health, ...
To score is human. Ranking individuals by grades and other performance numbers is as old as human society. Consumer scores — numbers given to individuals to describe or predict their characteristics, habits, or predilections — are a modern day numeric shorthand that ranks, separates, sifts, and otherwise categorizes individuals and also predicts their potential future actions. This new report by Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman explores this issue of predictive scores and privacy.
This op ed was originally published Wednesday, March 19 2014 in IAPP for the FTC Alternate Scoring Conference. In our modern sea of data, the resources to examine all relevant information regarding a decision is no longer feasible, so we use shortcuts. Consumer scores built using predictive analytics and fed by large datasets are the modern-day shortcuts to understanding individual consumer behavior. That’s why new and unregulated consumer scores abound. They are used widely in today’s world to predict consumers’ behavior, spending, health, fraud, profitability, and much more. These scores rely on petabytes of information coming from newly available data streams, and some old ones.
