Varieties of consumer credit data regimes: A regulatory governance approach

Credit markets are expanding, and with them also the automated, large‐scale commercialization of personal credit data. The increasing use of data and scores for commodified decision making lends greater urgency to the study of credit data regulatory regimes. This article promotes a comparative regulatory governance perspective as the basis for theory‐driven, multidimensional measurement. In order to measure consumer protection, we distinguish three different subregimes (collection, profiling, and use) and construct a two‐dimensional index of consumer protection (market restriction and user empowerment). We then assess the index and demonstrate its applicability and validity, building on empirical analysis of the regulatory regimes in the United States, France, Sweden, and Israel for the year 2019. Our approach points to a new direction in researching and measuring regulatory regimes in a comparative manner, which looks beyond national analysis toward an in‐depth understanding of other, equally important, levels of variation.     

Using similarity judgments to conduct a mugshot album search

Mugshot searches fail because the witness must be shown too many photos. Current methods to reduce the number rely too heavily on verbal reports of individual features. This research reports three tests of a new system that augments the presently used tools by having the witness choose photos that are subjectively similar to the target. Each photo thus chosen increases the ranking of every photo in the album that is similar to it, as determined by a similarity network in which the album photos are embedded. Because the ranking of the target itself is usually thus increased, it is soon displayed. The tests used familiar targets, an incidental one, and unfamiliar videoed ones. From 76% to 84% of the “witnesses” reached the target, having viewed 2.4 to 8.5 times fewer photos than they would have had they simply leafed through photos as is traditionally done.