Secret trust scores used by companies to judge us all

When you sign in to a Starbucks account, an Airbnb booking, or a reservation on OpenTable, a lot of information about you is instantly aggregated into a single score, and then evaluated with other personal data to determine if you are a bot. malicious. or potentially risky human.

This is often done by a service called Sift, which is used by startups and established companies, including Instacart and LinkedIn, to help guard against credit card fraud and the like. More than 16,000 signals inform the "Sift …