首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Secret E-Scores [A]Americans are obsessed with their scores. Credit scores, G.P.A.’s, SAT’s, blood pressure and cholesterol(
Secret E-Scores [A]Americans are obsessed with their scores. Credit scores, G.P.A.’s, SAT’s, blood pressure and cholesterol(
admin
2016-04-30
36
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 algorithms—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-scores 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.
An executive of eBureau claims that the company keeps the federally regulated data apart from those used to produce e-scores for marketing purposes.
选项
答案
N
解析
根据federally regulated data定位到N段。上文提到电子数据无形中造成双重制度,某些网上用户可以优先申请贷款和保险,某些人却没有这种资格。本段Mr.Meyer就这一问题发表了看法,并指出其公司相关系统已将不同用途的数据库资料区分开来。题目概括了该段第3句的主要意思,keep...apart from对应原文的separate...from。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/7RG7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
Wal-MartA)Wal-Martismorethanjusttheworld’slargestretailer.Itisaneconomicforce,aculturalphenomenonandalightni
Television:theCyclopsthatEatsBooksA)WhatisdestroyingAmericatodayisnottheliberalbreedofpoliticians,ortheInter
Thereasonfruitsandvegetablesaresoimportanttoyouroverallhealthisthattheyaremajorpurveyorsofantioxidants.A
A、Intheair.B、Ontheairfield.C、Underwater.D、Atplanemanufacturingfactory.A细节题。文中介绍了最危险的是第二步在空中进行的飞行测验。
A、Becausethewaterpressureisgreaterthanairpressure.B、BecausethefirstCometscrashedinthewater.C、Becausethereisl
A、Theyworkonthesamefloorsinthesameshoppingcenter.B、Theyhaven’tmetbefore.C、Theyarebothbusinessmajors.D、Theya
Inthemarket’seyes,thelatestroundofconsumer-spendingnewswasgood.Itwassogoodthatthestockshadanotherbubblingd
A、Hewillwriteashortpaperinsteadofalongone.B、Hehopestowriteapaper.C、Hedoesn’tknowwhich.D、Heprefersthetest
Negotiationsworkwonders.Thisisparticularlysoininternationalbusinesssinceitismostlythroughnegotiationsthatexport
A、Someonewhoalwaystalksabouthimself.B、Themostviolenttypeofco-workers.C、Someonewhostabsyourback.D、Themostcommo
随机试题
A.氯胺酮B.异氟烷C.丙泊酚D.恩氟烷E.硫喷妥钠脑电监测可出现癫痫样脑电波改变的是
当C5~T2脊髓前联合受损时可出现
1.背景某施工项目进展到第15周后,对前14周的工作进行统计检查,有关情况如下表所示:2.问题计算14周的CV与SV,并分析成本和进度情况。
简述认知差异的教育含义。
班主任通过对集体的管理去间接影响个人,又通过对个人的直接管理去影响集体,从而把对集体和个人的管理结合起来的管理方式叫做()。
甲、乙、丙三人大学毕业后选择从事各不相同的职业:教师、律师、工程师。其他同学做了如下猜测:小李:甲是工程师,乙是教师。小王:甲是教师,丙是工程师。小方:甲是律师,乙是工程师。后来证实,小李、小王和小方都只猜对了一半。
每个人只有在自己的优势领域才能发挥自己的最大作用。世界上没有什么通才,所谓的人才,从某种意义上说就是在最适合的岗位上和最能发挥其优势的领域中表现其聪明才智的人。因此,使用人才应当用其所长,各得其宜。大才大用,中才中用,小才小用。这段话的主旨是(
(1)在考生文件夹下有一个工程文件sjt3.vbp。程序的功能是通过键盘向文本框中输人大、小写字母和数字。单击标题为“统计”的命令按钮,分别统计输入字符串中大写字母、小写字母及数字字符的个数,并将统计结果分别在标签控件数组x中显示,如图所示。在给
2012级企业管理专业的林楚楠同学选修了“供应链管理”课程,并撰写了题目为“供应链中的库存管理研究”的课程论文。论文的排版和参考文献还需要进一步修改,根据以下要求,帮助林楚楠对论文进行完善。将文档中所有的文本“ABC分类法”都标记为索引项;删除文档中文
A、aChechenrebelambushB、RussiansoldiersC、RussianservicemenD、acivilianvehicleD
最新回复
(
0
)