{"id":92712,"date":"2019-06-26T16:24:14","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T23:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/retailers-are-judging-consumers"},"modified":"2019-06-26T16:24:14","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T23:24:14","slug":"retailers-are-judging-consumers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/retailers-are-judging-consumers","title":{"rendered":"Retailers Are Judging Consumers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/retailers-are-judging-consumers2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>China isn\u2019t the only country with a draconian <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/china-social-credit-system-barred-traveling-2018\">\u201csocial credit score\u201d<\/a> system \u2014 there\u2019s one quite a bit like it operating in the U.S. Except that it\u2019s being run by American businesses, not the government.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s plenty of evidence that retailers have been using a technique called \u201csurveillance scoring\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/research.cs.rutgers.edu\/~sofmac\/paper\/naacsos2005-app\/macskassy-naacsos2005-app.pdf\">for decades<\/a> in which consumers are given a secret score by an algorithm to give them a different price \u2014 but for the same goods and services.<\/p>\n<p>But the practice might be illegal after all: a California nonprofit called Consumer Education Foundation (CEF) <a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/policy\/technology\/450084-advocates-push-ftc-crackdown-on-secret-consumer-scores\">filed a petition yesterday<\/a> asking for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the shady practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China isn\u2019t the only country with a draconian \u201csocial credit score\u201d system \u2014 there\u2019s one quite a bit like it operating in the U.S. Except that it\u2019s being run by American businesses, not the government. There\u2019s plenty of evidence that retailers have been using a technique called \u201csurveillance scoring\u201d for decades in which consumers are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,32,1490,41,1511],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-education","category-government","category-information-science","category-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}