The World Privacy Forum has released a multi-year study on the “consumer scoring” industry, which, according to the group, is not consumer-facing or regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Consumer scoring uses thousands of data points to construct detailed dossiers of consumers to predict future behavior. “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,” the report states. World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon, in a recent Privacy Perspectives post, wrote, “Determining where new consumer protections are needed can only be done with meaningful transparency and cooperation from industry, and any scoring best practices need to be developed with full consumer participation in the dialogue.”
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