Comment by jimmytidey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmytidey | Hacker News Reader

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Commentary on China's social credit system so often fails to note the many parallels in western societies.

* The West has social credit scoring: money. A key principle of market economies is that accruing money is the just reward for contributing to society. Your bank account is your social credit score - yet we all know that many people get rich without rendering a useful service to society.

* Intelligence agencies keep security risk scores for every citizen. Just like China's policy decisions, there is almost no democratic oversight over how security services assign these scores.

* Credit ratings profoundly influence your life, for example, where you live depends on your ability on the mortgage a bank will offer you. These scores have almost no democratic oversight, just like China's policy decisions.

China is being radically transparent with its social credit system when compared with the West's unacknowledged or under-scrutinised scoring systems.

Each of these bullet points is either false or meaningless, which is frustrating because I sort of want to agree with your main point, but I just can't when it's phrased like this.

China obviously utilizes currency and a (very) limited free market. There has never been an alignment between wealth and social value, nor should there be. Yes, wealth creates inequality in the United States (in particular) and other more free-market oriented countries. Some of those countries (particularly Scandinavian ones) have taken great pains to see that actual suffering due to wealth inequality is minimized. The United States is culturally behind in this regard, but equating wealth with an explicit citizenship score is absurd.

Intelligence agencies do not keep security risk scores for every citizen (what country are you talking about, anyway?). I would wager at 10:1 odds that I don't have a profile at the FBI, CIA, or NSA in the United States (to be concrete). Even if they did (they don't) there are no legal uses of such a score, and any attempt to institutionalize something like that would have people rioting in the streets (literally). If I wanted to discover whether or not I had a "score" I would file a FOIA claim for each of those institutions.

Credit ratings are heavily regulated in the United States. Not as well as they could be, but see the Fair Credit Reporting Act from 1970 for a start. Credit reporting agencies are required to be transparent about the sources of their decisions, and hopefully we'll continue to make the system more predictable and humane. The uses of credit ratings are generally limited to situations where having a history of default is important information to a lender or renter. The colleges you applied to didn't, and won't, use your credit score.

Please try to communicate using specifics.

"China obviously utilizes currency" - I didn't mean to imply that China doesn't have money, obviously it does, and it functions as a social scoring system there too.

"do not keep security risk scores" - As other commenters point out, intelligence agencies use methods like cotraveller analysis and social network analysis which do seem to imply scoring all citizens. I guess they have an interpretation of the law which allows this.

You should FOIA the NSA and then we can find out for sure.

"Credit ratings are heavily regulated in the United States." - Credit ratings in the UK are notoriously opaque, if you believe a mistake has been made there is very little you can do. I don't know about the US.

Man, people hate this comment!

So what are you saying here?

I mean China has money and bank accounts too. Money's not western or capitalist. It has existed for many thousands of years.

Are you saying that this social credit system is not a notable invention, that it doesn't mean anything? This isn't news.

Maybe you're saying that criticism is hypocritical, throwing the first stone from a glass house...?

Hypocrisy is almost always easy to claim, because everything is hypocritical in some sense. ISIS? Who doesn't claim god's on their side. Who doesn't kill people in war? Using chemical weapons? Why does it matter how you kill people. Dictator? Europe's not a perfect democracy either, dont'yaknow.

Ie, unless we have a perfect, consistent system, shut up.

China is a part of the world, a big part. Their great firewall has become a normative thing, and it's affecting the world. Now this. It affects us. We have a right to criticize.

I agree. Not that the systems are precisely equivalent, of course, but that the devil we're used to is more invisible to us.

This is like saying, freedom is slavery.

You're missing a glaringly obvious difference. In the west, your credit isn't used by the government to influence your political affiliation so directly.

I remember hearing that if you are applying for a government job with a security clearance, then your finances and credit-worthiness is factor.

I'm referring to the Chinese government's ability to use this social credit system as a way to suppress those who would speak against the government.

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