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
2018-08-25
30
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.
The calculation of the e-score involves a large quantity of data and relies on computers.
选项
答案
C
解析
根据a large quantity of data和computer定位至C段。该段第2句提到,与谷歌业务相类似,网络消费者得分涉及海量数据和复杂电脑运算。题目中的a large quantity与原文unimaginable amounts对应,relies on与原文powered by对应。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/z9H7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
A、Mostpeopleconsumesimilaramountofsalt.B、Americanseatlesssaltthantheothers.C、Differentpeopleeatdifferentamount
A、Peopleareexploringwaystointerpretdreams.B、HowFreudexplaineddreamsinhisworks.C、Peoplehaven’treachedagreemento
A、Collectothercompanies’websites.B、Helppeoplestoreandruntheirwebsites.C、Helpcompaniesmaintaintheirservice.D、Esta
A、Thepeople.B、Theenvironment.C、Thetraffic.D、Theclimate.A本题问的是女士认为Cork这一城市最好的一方面是什么。对话最后,女士明确回答是人民和食物。
Esperantoisanartificiallanguage,designedtoserveinternationallyasan【B1】______meansofcommunicationamongspeakersofd
GeorgeHerbertMeadsaidthathumansaretalkedintohumanity.Hemeantthatwegainpersonalidentityaswecommunicatewithot
Articlesinmagazinesandnewspapersandspecialreportsonradioandtelevision【B1】______theconcernofmanyAmericansaboutth
Toseeifhaircoloraffectsaperson’schancesofgettingajob,researchersatCaliforniaStateUniversityasked136colleges
Inmanystressfulsituationsthebody’sresponsescanimproveourperformance.Webecomemore【B1】______,morealert,betterabl
Musicians—fromkaraokesingerstoprofessionalviolinplayers—arebetterabletoheartargetedsoundsinanoisyenvironment,ac
随机试题
在休克期,又称可逆性失代偿期,微循环出现淤血,病人出现休克的典型症状。()
四物汤的组成药味有()。
某男性,30岁,近二周前牙咀嚼疼痛,且牙龈肿胀有脓液流出,二年前该牙曾因龋坏而疼痛,未曾治疗。检查:残冠,近中邻面探及深龋洞,牙变色,叩诊有不适感,唇侧牙龈见一瘘管,有脓液溢出,X线片显示根尖有阴影。以下均是增强桩冠固位的方法,除外()
接收投标文件和开标前后两个环节,检查投标文件的密封情况应当依次分别由()负责。[2011年真题]
国家信用是国家(政府)以()身份筹集资金的一种信用形式。
公民认为具体行政行为侵犯其合法权益的,可以自知道该具体行政行为之日起()日内提出行政复议申请。
根据以下资料,回答问题。2011年第4季度,我国网上银行市场交易金额为209.91万亿,环比增长5.2%,2011年,网上银行市场全年交易金额为780.94万亿,同比增长42.1%,截至2011年年底,我国个人网上银行用户数达到4.34亿。2011
教师的教育情感主要表现在哪些方面?
历史向世界历史的转变,是人类历史发展进程中的重要转变。此前世界处于相对隔绝状态下的国家发展传统模式将被彻底打破,从此,任何国家和民族都必须在参加普遍交往和国际竞争中求得生存和发展。也就是说,愈来愈多的民族、国家和地区间的闭塞或半隔绝状态被打破,世界逐渐连成
Thetaskofbeingacceptedandenrolledinauniversitybeginsearlyforsomestudents.Long(1)_____theygraduatefromhighsc
最新回复
(
0
)