The Secret Trust Scores companies use to judge us all

When you log in to a Starbucks account, order an Airbnb or make a reservation on OpenTable, lots of information about you is broken into a single score, then evaluated with other personal data to determine if you are a harmful bot or potentially risky person.

Often it is done by a service called Sift, used by startup and established companies, including Instacart and LinkedIn, to protect against credit cards and other forms of fraud. More than 16,000 signals inform "Sift …