As a California resident I request to download my personal data from every service I can, and I’m constantly surprised. We each have scores for all kinds of things. The local power company keeps a “Green Ideology” score on me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
