We're All Being Judged By A Secret 'Trustworthiness' Score

From Zero Hedge.com (April 8):

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 - 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."

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?

…………..

Not always right

While Sift and SecureAuth strive for accuracy, sometimes it's difficult to decipher authentic purchasing behavior from fraud.

"Sometimes your best customers and your worst customers look the same," said Jacqueline Hart, head of trust and safety at Patreon - a site used by artists and creators to allow benefactors to support them. "You can have someone come in and say I want to pledge $10,000 and they’re either a fraudster or an amazing patron of the arts," Hart added. [read more]

This system sounds like China’s “social credit system” that blacklisted 13.49 million Chinese citizens for being “untrustworthy.” The Chinese gov’t uses the system to make China a more “moral” country. You want to make China more moral? Get rid of socialism and stop persecuting religions.