Today, the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection and the Federal Ministry of the Interior have published the results of a mutual study to evaluate scoring practices in Germany after the Data Protection Amendments in 2009.
The study, which was conducted by the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection in Schleswig-Holstein and the GP Forschungsgruppe reveales that:
- the right for consumers to attain a free of cost self-disclosure is fairly unknown. As such, only one-third of all questioned consumers enquired about entries relating to themselves.
- consumers find it hard to understand the enquired disclosure, since these are based on incomprehensible estimations and often incomplete data.
- testing scoring techniques is hardly possible, since providers usually do not reveal their applied statistical models.
Ulrich Kelber, Parliamentary State Secretary, commented on the study: “The study underlines the need to have a clear-cut legal framework for scoring practices. We need to take the results seriously, because scoring directly affects consumers. We should prevent that consumers are refused to receive a loan or cannot sign contracts due to a erroneous scoring.”
Further information can be found here.
Source: Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection