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  3. Secret E-Scores[A] Americans are obses

Secret E-Scores[A] Americans are obses

游客2024-04-04  27
问题                                          Secret E-Scores
[A] Americans are obsessed with their scores. Credit scores, G.P.A.’s, SAT’s, blood pressure and cholesterol (胆固醇) levels—you name it. 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.
[B] 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.
[C] Online consumer scores are calculated by a handful of start-ups, as well as a few financial services, that specialize in the flourishing field of predictive consumer analytics. It is a Google like business, one fueled by almost unimaginable amounts of data and powered by complex computer algorithms (算法). The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before. A company, called eBureau, develops eScores—its name for custom scoring algo-rithms—to predict whether someone is likely to become a customer. Gordy Meyer, the founder and chief executive, says his system needs less than a second to size up a consumer and to transmit his or her score to an eBureau client.
[D] 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.
[E] A growing number of companies, including banks, credit and debit card (借记卡) providers, insurers and online educational institutions are using these scores to choose whom to persuade on the Web. These scores can determine whether someone deserves a super credit card or a plain one, a full-service cable plan or none at all. They can determine whether a customer is routed promptly to an attentive service agent or moved to an overflow call center.
[F] Federal regulators and consumer advocates worry that these scores could eventually put some consumers at a disadvantage, particularly those under financial stress. In effect, they say, the scores could create a new subprime class: people who are bypassed by companies online without even knowing it Financial institutions, in particular, might avoid people with low scores, reducing those people’s access to home loans, credit cards and insurance.
[G] "The scoring is a tool to enable financial institutions to make decisions about financing based on unconventional methods," says David Vladeck, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission. "We are troubled by these practices."
[H] Federal law governs the use of old-fashioned credit scores. Companies must have a legally permissible purpose before checking consumers’ credit reports and must alert them if they are denied credit or insurance based on information in those reports. But the law does not extend to the new valuation scores because they are derived from nontraditional data and promoted for marketing. Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the United States Public Interest Research Group in Washington, worries that federal laws haven’t kept pace with change in the digital age.
[I] "There’s a nontransparent scoring system that collects information about you to generate a score— and what your score is results in the offers you get on the Internet," he says. "In most cases, you don’t know who is collecting the information, you don’t know what predictions they have made about you, or the potential for being denied choice or paying too much."
[J] Here’s how e-scores work: A client submits a data set containing names of tens of thousands of sales leads (线索) it has already bought, along with the names of leads who went on to become customers. EBureau then adds several thousand details—like age, income, occupation, property value, length of residence and retail history—from its databases to each customer profile. From those raw data points, the system calculates up to 50,000 additional variables per person. Then it searches thoroughly all that data for the rare common factors among the existing customer base. The result scores prospective customers based on their resemblance to previous customers.
[K] E-cores might range from 0 to 99, with 99 indicating a consumer who is a likely return on investment and 0 indicating an unprofitable one. But in some industries, "knowing the, bottom is more important than knowing the top," Mr. Meyer says. In online education, for instance, e-scores help schools distinguish prospective students who are not worth the investment of expensive course catalogs or attentive follow-up calls—like people who use fake names or adopt the identities of relatives. "If we can find 25 percent who have zero chance of enrolling, we can say ’don’t waste your money on them,’" he says. EBureau charges clients 3 to 75 cents a score, depending on the industry and the volume of leads. Such scores increase the accuracy and speed with which companies can identify potential customers, says Mr. Weintraub of the LeadsCon conference. "Scores tell you ’this person might actually qualify, so let’s focus on them,’ " he says. "This way you are not focusing on people who really can’t qualify."
[L] Most people never see their value scores. But some services openly discuss how their measurements work. A case study on the eBureau site, for example, describes how the company ranked prospective customers for a national prepaid debit card issuer, assigning each a score of 0 to 998. People who scored above 950 were considered likely to become highly profitable customers, generating revenue over six months of an estimated $213 per card. Those who scored less than 550 were predicted to be unprofitable clients, with estimated revenue of $74 or less. With eBureau’s system, the card issuer could identify and court the high scorers while avoiding low scorers.
[M] For companies, this kind of scoring clearly increases the speed and reduces the cost of acquiring customers. But consumers are paying a heavy price for that increased corporate efficiency, public interests advocates say. The digital scores create a two-tiered system that invisibly prioritizes some online users for credit and insurance offers while denying the same opportunities to others, says Mr. Mierzwinski of the Public Interest Research Group.
[N] Mr. Meyer and other eBureau executives disagree, saying the concerns are misplaced. EBureau, Mr. Meyer says, went to great lengths to build a system with both regulatory requirements and consumer privacy in mind. The company, he says, has put firewalls in place to separate databases containing federally regulated data, like credit or debt information used for purposes like risk management, from databases about consumers used to generate scores for marketing purposes.
[O] He adds that eBureau’s clients use the scores only to narrow their field of prospective customers— not for the purposes of approving people for credit, loans or insurance. Moreover, he says, the company does not sell consumer data to others, nor does it retain the scores it transmits to clients. "We are an evaluator," Mr. Meyer says. "We are trying to stay away from being intrusive to the consumer."
[P] It’s just another sign of the rise of what might be called the Scored Society. Google ranks our search results by our location and search history. Facebook scores us based on our online activities. Klout scores us by how many followers we have on Twitter, among other things. And now e-scores rank our potential value to companies. [br] The e-score is a type of digital score which measures a consumer’s buying power.
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答案 B
解析 根据digital score和buying power定位到B段。结合上文可知，该段首句中的these digital scores指代the e-score，本题句子的信息点与B段首句内容一致，B为本题答案。
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