I'd like to see one (1) person harmed by any of the data sharing that TeleSign has done here in the history of the company.
No Score = higher risk, higher interest.
Incorrect low score = perceived higher risk, higher interest rate.
Depending on how the risks of no/low score are weighted, and how wrong the inaccurate score is, a person may very well be more harmed by no score than by a low score. An inaccurate score might have to be massively off the mark to make a person worse off than no score at all. In the US for example, people with no credit history often get interest rates as high or higher than people with a relatively low credit score.
Of course from a privacy & data protection standpoint this doesn't make silently and secretly profiling customers okay. The solution is probably something more like a transparent opt-in system that has easy access for the customer to review their data and decide which pieces of it are included.
In the US, the balance is skewed a bit more towards secrecy, and it's not opt-in either. However you can with only modest difficulty check your credit score & information used to calculate it, and challenge parts of it that you think are inaccurate.
I totally understand that most people don’t realize how big of an issue online fraud is, but believe me: it is a MASSIVE problem with a lot of unforeseen consequences. There are so many angles to fraud in online services that it’s baffling to see with what new ways scammers and fraudsters come up with every day. So yes, this is something that totally justifies the means.
What's wrong with this? When I buy booze in Germany on Amazon for example this is already how it works, you verify your age with your national ID (which has support for a "eID" schema).
The big advantage is that the dedicated company doing the processing is by law required to delete all data after verification, so no commercial third party actually ever gets or can sell your identification data. That's way more secure and private than handing TikTok or other foreign companies your means of identification.
We would be living in a vastly more secure world if random companies only ever got a yes/no that you initiate by a dedicated, audited actor on your soil. And it basically eliminates fraud as well.
That sounds wonderful to me. Crack down on the shills and charlatans...