When I see the word "score", it reminds me of the CCP social scoring system.

Weird... when I see something done by US-Based capitalist and attributed to communists half a world away, it makes me think of the Powell Memo.

That is weird, the US didn't ask the CCP to invent social scoring.

I mean -also- weird to claim that the CCP invented scoring folks, but even if they did, it'd be hella weird to think that somehow they helped a US local power company implement it...

Look, I get that "CCP Bad". It's just always wild to see folks try and make that case when something has literally nothing to do with it, especially while there are plenty of pretty horrific and material mechanisms in play without pretending that the big-O Other is to blame.

It makes me curious what other scores (I would call them labels) there are.

How is that even legal?

Because it's not illegal. Most data privacy laws just require that user can see data collected about them and prevent sale of said data in optout fashion.

There are rarely laws around preventing collection of said data or using said data for some new service.

But it's not any data, it's political orientation data!

Sometimes people talk about GDPR being only the cookie banner, but thanks to it, its forbidden to collect that kind of data.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/

This is in the US. It’s a free country. Things are legal by default (that’s a good thing) until the system notices them and makes a law.

Having seen how things work where freedom is not the default, I much prefer freedom.

How do they know your ideology? Are they scraping your social media or running sentiment analysis on your customer service chats?

It’s likely some customer segmentation label generated through PCA or some other clustering approach.

The qualifying criteria is probably just having picked an offer for renewable-sourced energy in the past, indicating that it has some importance to you. So you will be given more green energy offers in future.

Every company segments its customer base this way for marketing. Sometimes it’s even useful.

I see... so maybe I should use PCA to give them the most uncorrelated response to all of their clusters as possible just to mess with them.

They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.