reputation score

A person's "trustworthiness rating" as determined by big tech and companies providing analytics. The reputation score, or trust score, which is not shown to users and not available for users, ranges from zero to 1 and is one of thousands of behavioral clues that social media companies such as Facebook take into account as it seeks to understand risk.

Historical perspective: China announced a social credit program in February 2018 and by September 2018, Facebook starting rating its users based on what they termed this "reputation score." Tech firms face increasing calls to reveal exactly how they decide what is unacceptable content, but Facebook has declined to explain how it determines a user’s trustworthiness, out of fear bad actors will use that information to rig the system.

So now we all have a secret online trust score, a score about you that you don’t know about that websites use to evaluate whether you might be a bot or a fraudster, according to The Wall Street Journal. Companies create these scores based on more than 16,000 signals to flag devices, credit cards, or accounts that a company might want to block. You can’t find out the score, because it’s not tied to your name. But data gathered by one company is shared with others. So when one site finds fishy behavior linked to an email, that could mark it as risky for other companies. One signal that an account really belongs to a human: Problems signing in, because the bots log in perfectly every time.

According to Kashmir Hill of The New York Times, as consumers, we all have secret scores: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive . "These e-scores are often believed to be inaccessible, but I got mine from a company called Sift and I found it shocking. It was more than 400 pages long and contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb and years of Yelp delivery orders." Sift is not the only company in the business of scoring customers and then selling that data to clients. Five of them—Sift, Zeta Global, Retail Equation, Riskified, and Kustomer—will share the data they have on you if you contact them or fill out an online form.