Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
November 4, 2019 06:26 pm PST

New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her

ALmost nobody reads terms of service agreements when they use online services. When you click the "I AGREE" box you give these companies permission to sell and share your data with third parties. A company called Sift amasses that data and has huge files on everyone. Kashmir Hill asked Sift for her consumer score and what she found was "shocking."

From The New York Times:

The [Wall Street] Journals 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 theres no file with your name that it can produce upon request.

As of this summer, 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 Id ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time Id 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.

Sift knew, for example, that Id used my iPhone to order chicken tikka masala, vegetable samosas and garlic naan on a Saturday night in April three years ago. It knew I used my Apple laptop to sign into Coinbase in January 2017 to change my password. Sift knew about a nightmare Thanksgiving I had in Californias wine country, as captured in my messages to the Airbnb host of a rental called Cloud 9.

The data that companies like Sift and others collect and analyze will be used as inputs by algorithms that make unappealable life changing decisions about you without your awareness, consent, or control. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/wNMw8mfoEns/new-york-times-writer-is-shock.html

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article