Your daily habits, used for who knows what purpose over the many decades remaining in your life, are worth a hell of a lot more than a latte.
The Chinese social credit system looks at your social media and phone usage and says, "Sorry, we're denying you a loan because you were critical of the government."
It is fair to criticize the prospective Equifax system and the concerns around pervasive data collection are valid. But the Chinese system is in a whole different, far more evil league.
> While English-language media describe China’s social credit system as a Black Mirror-like authoritarian implementation, Chinese social media users seem to focus more on the advantages than the burdens.
This is a remarkably tone-deaf observation given that talking about the burdens will get them imposed on you.
Fed with enough data, a ML system should be able to derive “We’re denying you a loan because you’re likely to default on it because you’re likely to lose your job because you’re critical of the government”.
It likely wouldn’t be able to express that to humans that way, though, so humans would say “We’re denying you a loan because the computer says we should”
We must be very careful.
... and exercise and driving telemetry data and family medical and criminal history and...
At a certain threshold the distinction with the Chinese system becomes irrelevant given the impact on an individual.
That's a common misconception of how Chinese social credit works. China doesn't really care if you're criticizing the government as long as if they don't think of you as a threat. If they do, they'll simply imprison you. If the government is only a little suspicious, they wouldn't want to send you on guard by lowering your credit score.
This one says "Nope, the Chinese system wouldn't use the credit system for non benign reason. They don't care"
Different standard?
I think calling it outright 'evil' is unfair.
The Chinese model at least comes from a well-intentioned place. It's a ham-fisted version of the "nudge" programs you see in places like insurance plans, with a bolder underlying goal to create a better society. Their definition of "better" may not be yours, but the goal is not inherently malicious.
The American take of this will have the exact same flaws-- the data will eventually be mishandled, the models will have holes you can drive a bus through-- but it's justified in the sake of "we'll get slightly more accurate pricing for credit and insurance".
That being said, since these systems are abstraction on debt, the failure mode at the margins means that companies that become reliant on funds from these loans will be increasingly sensitive to people at the margins who will be denied such loans.
I also find it interesting that the public will also have increasingly more access to the data to be able to retroactively understand the factors that determine the go/no go (especially as these systems become increasingly automated). Combined with the above, it will be increasingly possible to create ways to dirty the waters in the signals for a variety of desired outcomes for 3rd party actors.
My concern is that the truly evil have stealth and pretence on their side, while people who are developing the behaviours and norms that will be necessary for us to cope with the societal challenges we face - for example people who espouse radical anti-consumerism - may be driven out of debate by the norms and norm maintenance mechanisms that are accidentally and with good intention being developed in the west.
They will feed your behavior into a machine learning algorithm, which will probably develop biases.
If it turned out that Ethnic Group A is on average 5% more reliable about paying their debt, this is valuable information, but the banks are legally bound to ignore it.
So they've probably spent a lot of time trying to produce similar metrics through proxy measurements. Seek out a profession or purchasing pattern that suggests a given ethnicity without outright saying it.
I suspect AI is, from a legal CYA perspective, the greatest proxy of them all. "It's a black box, we don't/can't know how it produces its results... yet mysteriously it biases exactly how we would if we could overtly discriminate."
> At time of writing, Sesame Credit has 240.000 fans on its official Weibo account (@芝麻信用), where they promote the most recent benefits to users with higher credit scores, such as the possibility to get Hello Bicycle (哈罗单车) rental bikes without deposits.
> Apart from Hello Bike or Ford, there is a myriad of other brands that seem happy to participate in the Sesame Credit system and the idea of Shared Economy. “Thumbs up for sharing [economy]!”, some netizens comment.
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/open-sesame-social-credit-in-ch...
> Team of scholars at Freie Universität Berlin surveyed 2,200 citizens. Particularly high level of approval among older and better educated
https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2018/fu...
The comedown from empire isn't pretty and even if the trade war somehow delays China from superseding the US GDP it is somewhat inevitable. Although the social credit system probably comes to the US it is naive at best to assume that the vast majority of other forms of control that China has developed don't make their way over the Pacific.
Here's an article where a credit score based on phone habits is viewed positively: https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/02/22/woman-l...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/audreymurrell/2018/07/31/pushin...
It's not. It's because of scale. If a similar system was being implemented in the US the shitstorm would be even bigger.
Tala is a whole other story, it is small scale and not mandatory. As it grows to the point where using it is expected or required it will face the same exact criticism.
I get what you're saying, but I still sense some cognitive dissonance. If the US lets some hip start up build a social credit score and then just heavily buys into it, I think it will face less pushback than if they use a scary federal contractor to build the same score. I get the feeling that people think governments are intentionally evil.
You can certainly feel whatever you want, but I see many many comments with specific privacy concerns that don't even mention China.
In fact, when I glanced at the comments before clicking through to the article, none of the top comments mentioned China.
The value of something does have a temporal component. You're talking about a cup of coffee now, when I desperately need caffeine, vs. the value of something (my personal data) far into the future.
You are surely not serious?