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Comment by nimrod0 | Hacker News Reader

The Big Three credit bureaus started exactly as a social credit system. They'd send snoops to keep tabs on you and collect gossip from your friends.

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To the best of my knowledge, not having been alive at the time, credit cards in the US and Canada mostly started as department store cards, from the days when companies like Sears, Montgomery Ward, etc were dominant. You couldn't even get a card unless you were a man, women could get a card under their husband's name. The system evolved out of single-store charge cards to general purpose cards.

The difference here is how it's used: If you have a "bad" social credit score in China you can't participate in some activities, right up to buying a domestic train or airline ticket. Possibly because your online writings have angered somebody working for their Internet Police. Or you have expressed an unpopular political opinion. Or you're a Uyghur.

If you have a "bad" US credit score you can't get an apartment, a job, a post-paid mobile plan, or any number of things nowadays that ask for your SSN. That's why identity theft can trash a person's life. Same with ad profiles built around your activities and movements. You think that's not being sold around commercially and the intelligence community hasn't obtained a copy? The scaffolding is all there.

Oh, it's absolutely there, and your life is definitely crippled with a bad credit score in the US. But that's strictly financial. You can have an amazing FICO score and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee (within legal limits of not threatening anybody). Try the equivalent in China.

It's a social credit score which gauges your compliance with societal and police-state defined norms.

I understand the impulse to distinguish the two but there simply isn't as much distinction as you perhaps would like to believe. An apartment or a job aren't strictly financial, and while credit bureaus construct your scores out of mainly financial transactions at the moment, they have started out as much more, as I've mentioned, and they've always been looking for other non-financial but correlating variables from your life activities; can't find the link right now, but there was recently an internal whitepaper on such an algorithm using non-financial data.

And again, the US government does care about dissent and goes to great lengths to build files on what it considers potentially subversive forces that are essentially political dissidents. The same controlling impulses are there. And since the scaffolding is all there, the only things safeguarding against a dystopia are, firstly, the clear-headed and astute attention against various soft forms of social control, secondly the maintenance of decentralization as a virtue, and lastly the robust exercise of checks and balances that are nominally provided institutionally, and not, as your answer seems to imply, the intricacies of how certain scores are constructed.

>and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee

and how relevant is that to the life of the average American citizen?

In a sense, the American apparatus is significantly more advanced. You don't even need a scary government and a social credit or a staunch party line. You simply dangle the carrot of free political speech around, let people run around with their signs on the street on occasion and they're perfectly content with their lot.

> But that's strictly financial.

Being homeless and jobless is a strictly financial problem?

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