I write about this topic a lot, why? Because flawed data and data selling has become an epidemic in the US. It is all not accurate. E-Scoring gets around the laws as far as giving any consumer any information they sell...
So here’s a new score to obsess about: the e-score, an online calculation that is assuming an increasingly important, and controversial, role in e-commerce.
These digital scores, known broadly as consumer valuation or buying-power scores, measure our potential value as customers. What’s your e-score? You’ll probably never know. That’s because they are largely invisible to the public. But they are highly valuable to companies that want — or in some cases, don’t want — to have you as their customer.
Online consumer scores are calculated by a handful of start-ups, as well as a few financial services stalwarts, that specialize in the flourishing field of predictive consumer analytics. It is a Google-esque business, one fueled by almost unimaginable amounts of data and powered by complex computer algorithms. The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before.
It’s true that credit scores, based on personal credit reports, have been around for decades. And direct marketing companies have long ranked consumers by their socioeconomic status. But e-scores go further. They can take into account facts like occupation, salary and home value to spending on luxury goods or pet food, and do it all with algorithms that their creators say accurately predict spending.
Every month, eBureau scores about 20 million American adults on behalf of clients like banks, payday lenders and insurers, looking to buy the names of prospective customers. An eBureau spinoff called TruSignal, scores about 110 million consumers monthly for advertisers seeking select audiences for online ads.
eBureau’s clients use the scores to answer basic business questions about their potential audience.
This is how your data is being sold and when a data bases gets queried with other data and it starts out flawed, it gets worse.
60 Minutes a few weeks ago did an in depth story on this and watch it if you have not seen it because this is all true. This is big business and companies and banks make billions in profit every year and you don't see it as it's all done by machines, computers programmed to move money and it's all over the place and not just limited to the credit information.
E-scoring as noted here does not fall under federal law so they can buy and sell data and use it to market as well. Ever wonder why you get some solicitations at times either in the mail or online? What if an insurance company is using such “scoring”? If there are exchanges set up, what good does it do to help those who are no insured with some bad credit rating information as those are the folks struggling to make a come back and obviously they are the crowd the healthcare reform law is trying to help. If e-scoring is used to determine how to sell and market them with credit scoring sources outside the normal federally approved sources, what’s this going to do?
The founder of one such company made $89 million when he sold RiskWise analytics to LexisNexis and then used that money to start eBureau. See how this type of business builds on itself with the algorithms for analytics use and it works behind the scenes to where nobody knows.
Obviously federal laws are outdated here it appears. As a consumer, you don’t even know the information is being collected and reported on you, not nice. In addition, you have no idea as to what “score” has been generated either so again an error that shows up here can also have the ability to black ball consumers, especially those who are trying to recover.
Data mining leads to spun data in many areas and it hurts consumers as we are now getting credible data combined with non credible data and crunching numbers is fine but when you do something like FICO sells on the medication compliance analytics they sell, we have mismatched data as this is the perfect example of credible with non credible information being combined. How do you combine such intelligence and then turn around and score people individually from zero to 500 and sell that analyzed data to insurance and drug companies as being credible?
It hurts consumers as we don’t have enough folks out there that know how to work with “flawed data” and take everything they see on the computer screen to the bank? There’s the big part of the insanity today and when a naïve novice looks at such numbers a patient may get denied access to medications.
Here's a good video that tells you how math and algorithmic formulas are moving money and shaping us.
This is what's going on and the battles we have to get some of the 1% money back to the 99%.
I have a campaign to license and tax data sellers as again you hear companies have so much cash today, this is big part of it as an example of Walgreens in 2010 made short of $800 million selling data only, think of how large this is when you bring it all in with banks and others. This is all data about us and it gets mismatched. The profits are so big that companies really work to find relationships between some sets of data, so they can sell it and it's not accurate. I have more details at the link below.
60 Minutes Confirms the Super Attacks of the Killer Algorithms With Consumer Credit Information With Flawed Data and the Inability to Algorithmically Fix Errors Which Really Makes a Huge Case for Licensing and Taxing All Data Sellers in the US–Chapter 54
Here the machines put a second driver on my car insurance, it was flawed data mining as I sold my house and months later when they sent my odometer statement they had a second driver listed, the people I sold my house to 6 months ago..scary, yes and they did an address match and records were not up to date.
Insurance Company Data Mining With Automated Transactions? What Is Being Done With Consumer Data–My Flawed Corporate America Data Shows Up -Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 45
Again I'm writing this to hopefully bring some light as to what happens in the background that you and I do not see, touch or control, yet when there's mistake we are on our own ticket to fix it and the amount of flawed data is growing. We are stuck as we can't buy a car, home, etc. until the data gets fixed. States already license data mining bots and some states have had to add extra software to keep the bots to a minimum as the servers slow down to a crawl. It's an epidemic in the US with banks and companies as it's easy money once the computer code is written to execute and you don't see it, billions and billions are made in profits.
Time Has Come to License and Tax the Data Sellers of the Web, Companies, Banks, Social Networks..Any One Making a Profit–Consumers Deserve to Know What Is Being Sold and To Who in a Searchable Format
Healthcare apps sell your data like crazy, insurance companies make tons selling data and they use it for analytics they create with mismatched data, done only to make money. The business models start at the top and just like banks have their Quants that create the math for the business models, companies do too, United Health care for one is always looking for more quants, so it's the formulas and math that keep moving and taking our money. A good start to get some back is to license and tax them along with requiring a federal site to where they update and disclose what kind of data they sell and to who. We have no clue right now.