We're All Being Judged By a Secret 'Trustworthiness' Score (wsj.com)

schwit1 writes: Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we're buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal.

More than 16,000 signals are analyzed by a service called Sift, which generates a "Sift score" ranging from 1 to 100. The score is used to flag devices, credit cards and accounts that a vendor may want to block based on a person or entity's overall "trustworthiness" score, according to a company spokeswoman.

From the Sift website: "Each time we get an event be it a page view or an API event we extract features related to those events and compute the Sift Score. These features are then weighed based on fraud we've seen both on your site and within our global network, and determine a user's Score. There are features that can negatively impact a Score as well as ones which have a positive impact."

The system is similar to a credit score except there's no way to find out your own Sift score.

Factors which contribute to one's Sift score (per the WSJ):

• Is the account new?
• Are there are a lot of digits at the end of an email address?
• Is the transaction coming from an IP address that's unusual for your account?
• Is the transaction coming from a region where there are a lot of hackers, such as China, Russia or Eastern Europe?
• Is the transaction coming from an anonymization network?
• Is the transaction happening at an odd time of day?
• Has the credit card being used had chargebacks associated with it?
• Is the browser different from what you typically use?
• Is the device different from what you typically use?
• Is the cadence of the way you typed out your password typical for you? (tracked by some advanced systems)

Comments

Ummm....

[brunes69]

... this looks like standard anti-fraud measures that banks and retail have been doing for years and years and years. It's not creating a profile of YOU, its creating a profile of YOUR CARD so it can detect if it's been compromised.

IE - you definitely want this.

Nothing to see here.

Re:Ummm....

[Applehu Akbar]

YOU DON'T WANT OR NEED THIS. Your bank is the one on the hook for fraud.

Ultimately, every banking customer pays for fraud. Businesses don't 'absorb' ongoing costs; they always show up in the fees you pay for service.

Time for a general Data equiv to the FCRA

[Etcetera]

The "Big Data" companies of the day have all become heavily regulated in what they can store, how they can store, how long they can store, and have transparency laws about providing consumers access to their own data reports and challenging information in them.

It's time for this to extend to all large-scale person-identification projects, and if the data brokers have to be torn apart to do so, so be it.

16000 data points is a bit much for that

[rsilvergun]

what they're really looking at is how good a customer you are.

That sounds innocuous until it's not. As the data improves and as companies continue to consolidate and share data (possible because we've completely removed the breaks on mergers and anti-trust law today) the companies will start doing the same sorts of things China plans to do with its "Social Credit" system. We've already seen a bit of this where web sites track you and show higher prices if they think you'll pay it. Sprint also rather famously made a list of the customers who cost the most due to customer service calls and "fired" them.

Whether it's a mega corporation or a fascist government doesn't matter to me. I don't care if the jackboot on my throat is a public or private one, I don't want a jackboot on my throat. That said I'm not so naive as to think I can avoid powerful government institutions. The anarchist or libertarian route doesn't work, it just makes a power vacuum. If I don't form a government with my fellow citizens a mega corp will fill that void.

The time is now to either start enforcing anti-trust to prevent these kinds of power concentrations (while making sure voter suppression stops so we don't end up with the public option Jackboot). Either that or heavy regulation, especially for "natural" monopolies (think Google, or your cable company).

My first thought was China's social credit score

[rsilvergun]

this is basically a private version of that. Same effect but palpable to Americans since it's not the government doing it...