What is YOUR secret consumer score? Before seeing the title of this post, did you even know you have one? In fact, more than one. This impacts on how ethically firms treat us. If they have tons of information about us that we do not have about ourselves. 🙁
Also, look at these relevant posts:
- Consumers Beware Online Marketing Tricks
- Issues in Business Ethics
- Perceived Honesty of Professionals
- Clever or Unethical Use of Marketing
Something Else to Worry About: What Is YOUR Secret Consumer Score?
While reading below, try not to be even more upset about all of the data collected on us. Instead, learn about your scores.
According to Kashmir Hill, writing for the NY Times:
“As consumers, we all have ‘secret scores’: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business. Whether we can return items at a store. And what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue. Likewise, high scores get you elite treatment.”
“In April 2019, the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. ‘Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, ‘yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.’ Yet, as of summer 2019, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.”
“There are many companies in the business of scoring consumers. The challenge is to identify them. Once you do, the instructions on getting your data will probably be buried in their privacy policies.”
Click the image. Then, scroll down Hill’s article to find tips about how to contact multiple scorekeepers.
