> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn would feed into their credit ratings
The wet dream of an authoritarian government.
The wet dream of an authoritarian government.
China's vision is much worse.
* Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
* The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
* In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
* It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
* Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.
* Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
* Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Many people have heard very little about Weibo so saying that by itself doesn't carry as much meaning and the name is irrelevant to the discussion.
obviously not true, Alibaba tried numerous times to gain some market share in social media, but all their attempts failed.
You need a permit?
Right in practice this doesn't matter so much.... As long as you're not a dissident of course :/
What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back.
So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
Given that scoring bots in mass use will necessarily decrease the dimensionality of the data into fewer, more tractable features, and thus creating bots need only to target the dimensionality-reduction step, rather than reproduce "human behavior."
Which seems rather simple given the variance in natural language and normal human social interaction.
Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest.
Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity.
In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
Surely that's a bit "deviant".
Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).