Categorizing and scoring humans “is as old as time itself,” and consumer scores—“numbers given to people to describe their characteristics, habits or predilections—are a modern day numeric shorthand,” writes World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon. In this post for Privacy Perspectives, Dixon, who was a speaker during today’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on Alternative Consumer Scoring, looks into the practice, noting not all scores are of concern—particularly those not identifying individual consumers. Scores that do merit concern, however, are those related to eligibility, vulnerable groups or other sensitive information. As a result, Dixon argues that fairness and transparency should be part of industry consideration as well as building “a useful continuum of what scores are unobjectionable and what scores require consumer protection.”
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