Osano monitors the data privacy practice of thousands of companies. Rather than scoring companies on an absolute scale, Osano implements relative scoring.
Relative scoring means that as the privacy practices of the collective group of companies improve or decline, vendors are ranked relative to their peers.
An example of relative scoring in action is this. Suppose that your vendor ranked highly in all categories in June of 2017. GDPR took effect in May of 2018 and in preparation for compliance with GDPR, many companies began improving their privacy practices and documentation. If your vendor ranked highly in 2017 but failed to keep up with the changes that other companies were making, over time that vendor's score would decline.
Similarly, if a large number of vendors all reduced their transparency and their practices worsened, that decline in their scores would actually increase the score of your vendor.