You're being scored; you just don't know it

April 7, 2014 12:00PM ET

by Claire Gordon @clairedon Google+

The Toronto advertising agency made it very clear they wanted Sam Fiorella, a marketing executive with 20 years of senior experience. In the interview, he said he was told several times that they couldn't believe he was available, that he was probably overqualified.

Then he remembers the interviewer asking, "By the way, what's your Klout score?"

"I embarrassingly admitted that I had no idea what Klout was at the time," Fiorella told America Tonight.

So the interviewer checked his score – which ranks an individual's social media influence – right there on her computer. "Oh, that's not high enough," he said she responded. They never called him back.

Klout.com

After that happened in March 2011, Fiorella dedicated himself to upping his score. Through prolific Tweeting and various tricks, he zoomed up the charts. Companies started sending him free stuff: an umbrella from the Weather Network, boxes of Pop Chips, a bottle of wine. People with high Klout scores have also been known to get all-expense-paid trips and hotel upgrades. A couple of Fiorella's clients have used Klout scores to determine who gets better customer service.

Klout is one of several scores you likely have, whether you wanted them or not. They affect the kinds of deals, prices and services you're offered, and they're formulated by fancy algorithms in black boxes, often by companies you've never heard of.

Though its formula is closely guarded, Klout is unique in the fact that its scores are public. Most of these new "consumer scores" that have exploded in the last few years are private and unregulated. For many of them, if you even found out that you had a score with a retailer, or an analytics or marketing company, you probably don't have the right to know what it is.

Scorelogix says its Job Security Score empowers consumers to asses the risk that they'll be laid off.

Scorelogix

"Scores can be made by the government, by insurers, by retailers, by analytics companies, by data brokers, by the post office," said Pam Dixon, founder and director of the World Privacy Forum, who on Wednesday published the first major report on consumer scoring, along with privacy researcher Bob Gellman.

Of the hundreds of scores that Dixon discovered floating around the country, there's the Job Security Score, which purports to predict your future income; Fraud Scores, which indicate the likelihood that you are mischief-making; and the Brand Name Medicine Propensity Score, which judges your likelihood to pick generics over brand name drugs.

Then there are custom scores, cooked-up in-house by individual businesses, or by outside companies like Versium. For example, Target's pregnancy predictor score, uncovered by The New York Times in 2012, uses a sophisticated algorithm to start bombarding women with specialized ads as early as their second trimester.

We know health risk scores are out there, but we don't know all the ways they're being used. We just can't.

Pam Dixon

Founder and director of the World Privacy Forum

Organizations have always tried to measure people, to make their work – be it policing or marketing or raising money – more efficient. Dixon's concern is that we just don't know who's scoring us, how they're scoring us and the ways those scores are being used.

"There's too much we don't know," Dixon told America Tonight. "We know health risk scores are out there, but we don't know all the ways they're being used. We just can't."

eBureau boasts that its custom eScores "are valuable to virtually any business-to- consumer enterprise or government agency that wishes to leverage data and analytics to improve decisions and results."

eBureau

Many of these scores are geared toward marketers, and seem relatively harmless. For example, if you have a high Veriscore, made by Experian, you might get more calls from telemarketers. If you have a high Donor Score, from SMR Research, you might get solicited more for money.

But others can hit your bottom line. Companies like Staples and Home Depot use scores to adjust the prices of products on their websites, as The Wall Street Journal learned in 2012. And then there are alternative credit scores. The alternative credit industry argues that these are used only for advertising purposes, but they often tout other uses, like helping financial institutions assess risk. And these scores could very well be inaccurate, or their formula outright discriminatory.

In doing the research for her book "Dragnet Nation," Julia Angwin found that the alternative credit scoring company eBureau had her listed as a low-income single mother with no college education.

"None of them are true," she told America Tonight. "So I went to their website, like 'Who are these guys?'" One of the uses eBureau advertised on its website, she said, was to check eligibility for services at a charity hospital.

After his Klout score killed his job prospect, Fiorella started researching it, and what its value really was for companies trying to sell products. In his resulting book "Influence Marketing," Fiorella concludes: "It was all completely bogus."

But much of the data these companies have is likely remarkably true and detailed, their algorithms inspired and their predictive powers eerily spot on. The point is, we just don't know.