Statistical Parity

Forget worrying about loyalty cards or programs: it’s the everyday purchases you make tied to your name with a debit or credit card that can land you on data brokers’ lists. That is one of the many facts that the new FTC report on data brokers sets forth. The report offers a high-level analysis with establishing new fact patterns about the industry based on the Commission’s investigation of nine major data brokers. Overall, we find things to like in the report, but we wish the FTC had gone further in some areas. Here are some of the high points that stood out to us.

Two key recent reports published by the World Privacy Forum, The Scoring of America and Data Brokers and the Federal Government, were cited in the White House’s new report on Big Data. WPF is supportive of the report. “We are pleased that the White House report has correctly recognized critically important issues that impact individuals’ privacy in the area of big data. We commend the report for clearly recognizing that information originally intended for marketing purposes can also be used to impact individuals’ marketplace opportunities in substantive ways that impact peoples’ daily lives, and that creating meaningful protections is important,” said WPF executive director Pam Dixon.

This op ed was originally published Wednesday, March 19 2014 in IAPP for the FTC Alternate Scoring Conference.

In our modern sea of data, the resources to examine all relevant information regarding a decision is no longer feasible, so we use shortcuts. Consumer scores built using predictive analytics and fed by large datasets are the modern-day shortcuts to understanding individual consumer behavior. That’s why new and unregulated consumer scores abound. They are used widely in today’s world to predict consumers’ behavior, spending, health, fraud, profitability, and much more. These scores rely on petabytes of information coming from newly available data streams, and some old ones.

  WPF Blog Post   Forbes has published a thoughtful article about Big Data, reeling the hype attached to the catchy term back to reality. The article, written by Forbes contributors Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, outlines why the term Big Data isn’t used by people who actually work in Big Data. The article meanders

The NCLC, Consumer’s Union, and the World Privacy Forum filed extensive joint comments today regarding the proposed rulemaking, Procedures to Enhance the Accuracy and Integrity of Information Furnished to Consumer Reporting Agencies under Section 312 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act. The results of the proposed rulemaking will have a significant impact on how the accuracy of credit reports is defined for consumers, and will have a substantive influence over how consumers may handle credit report disputes directly with those who furnish information for the reports.