The Social Credit System in China [video]

* There is no one system (which is why the title is "The" Social Credit System, the scare quotes are there on purpose!), but ~70 local experiments, with the talk focusing on three of these (~19:45)

There isn't a central one. To be fair many credit systems exist for a while, for example financial credits from banks, traffic violation credit from DOT, airplane/train black-list, Dang'an system (rongcheng), etc. All of them aren't much different from their western counterparts, with one exception (Dang'an).

* Alibaba's Sesame/Zhima system is not government-accredited (~26:00) and has a lot of shopping/loyalty card features (pay with Alipay, earn points!)

Worked in Alibaba before and can confirm. Not government-accredited and not much different from a financial credit score, though much more commercial institutes are adapting it. For example, you don't need to pay deposit when opening a bike sharing account if you sesame score is above a threshold.

* The current systems have many crippling flaws, like rich people being trivially able to buy their way to good scores to paper over their sins (~35:00)

Not true for the majority but there's one exception. You can pay others to 'deduct' your traffic violation points. However it's not exactly buying way to good scores. Let me explain. In China violation is caught on traffic camera 99% of the time, while in the US most tickets are issued by a police officer. Thus the violation is issued on the vehicle since there's no way to identify who's the driver from camera footage. So people literally can claim someone else is driving the vehicle and points will be deducted from their account. Everyone has 12 points, refreshed every year. Most time that's enough to cover minor incidents.

* Some type of nationwide system is likely to be rolled out nationally at some point, but the details are still very fuzzy (~49:00)

There's proposal but I think it's both stupid and infeasible to design such a score. And various credit scores are already implemented and functioning, there's no need to get a new one.

I think it should be translated as 'The National Credit System'

Let's put it this way, despite the ills of the US Credit Bureaux, I would want the Chinese Social Credit system much less. Even with no credit, one can still get on a train, it does not affect what schools you can put your kids in, or penalize my spot in a gov't queue.

It's not punitive. If you have too many lines of credit out and you can't pay them, why should a company extend credit? For charity?

Cycle of debt and poverty statement makes no sense. Credit scores do not do that. People can easily repair credit scores by beginning to repay their existing loans. They don't even have to be paid off, just in repayment.

Your ideas regarding credit score and "social credit" as comparable similar systems is false. I don't think you're an American at all now that I think about it.

Sounds like a Sybil attack.

It's illegal, some local official already been prisonized for doing that[0]. So the argument is no longer true.

If the "social credit point" will become a reality, then I don't think it can be traded in a lawful fashion as well, as allowing it will discredit the system.

Might be a good way to destroy the system by rending it useless now that I think about it.

[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http...

This is very much like building a Panopticon.

> It's a very small thing to make people second-guess a critical blog post or Reddit comment about China in case they ever want to visit or do business with a company that has any Chinese presence.

That would be difficult to extend to activity in non-cooperative regimes. China has been working to de-anonymize internet access by making phone numbers traceable to national ID numbers, network connections/IP addresses traceable to phone numbers [1], and forum posts traceable to IP addresses.

I think it's unlikely that they'd be able to automatically trace a pseudonymous post on reddit made by an American in the US to a particular US passport number to factor reddit posts into a social credit score at a large scale.

However, they might be able to do it for public posts on a real-name policy site like Facebook. With facial recognition and a real name, they could probably reliably match an account to a passport to sanction posts they dislike. They'd probably be fine with any false positives due to fake accounts, etc.

[1] e.g. to connect to airport wifi, the landing page asks for your (local) cell number, and texts you a code for access.

I really shouldn’t be using my real name on HN, however.

> Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.

https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-Censorship-China-...

> Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real-world events with collective action potential are censored.

https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experiment...

> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

-- Noam Chomsky

> Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.

-- Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965)

Individual capable of critical thought and coherent mental models is kind of the pre-requisite for whatever groups do or fail to do. It's a chicken-and-egg thing, in a way, because such invididuals depend on society to be given the tools for that, or to at least not be suppressed when they build them from scratch. But a group made up of individuals who can't hold their own individual ground, will not fare better by multiplying that in the group, and giving individuals even less reason to think things through. The end results is people who can "support" this or that, but cannot act. They can choose, but not make. They can join, but not face.

I don't think that is an accident or a mistake, and people who are saying something like "1984 wasn't a manual" are sadly mistaken, because it is also a manual, it cannot help but be. Just like knowledge of medicine, knowing how to heal a person, is also knowledge on how to harm them. The trouble is when the abuse of insights overcomes the use of them.

They do not need to care about edge cases - a citizen unfairly falling through the cracks is just as unimportant as any other citizen, so the gestalt effect matters more.

When I brought up privacy concerns, social concerns, etc, he looked at me like I was talking Swahili. I tried bringing up the Stasi, and he didn't know what I was talking about. 1984, had never read it. Secret police... they apparently only go after bad people.

The sorts of things you're talking about are genuinely not on the radar of the average person over there. It would require education they specifically and intentionally don't have. (And, if I were to guess, are encouraged never to learn)

None of this is criticizing China and Chinese culture, only the authoritarianism of the communist party.

Surprisingly, I'm conflicted with the idea of the social credit system. On the one hand, I don't like intrusive all seeing Big Bro systems. On the other, I really hate low trust societies with a passion, and I would love to see China evolve into a higher trust, if not high trust society. It would be nice to be able to conduct more everyday transactions over there with less paranoia.

The difference is that china is implementing a centralised, state controlled system. Which will elevate the minor tyranny of some obnoxious policy in some organisation to an unchecked and magnified universal tyranny. This is precisely why we need checks, balances and distribution of power, because the elite minority cannot be trusted.

This is a bad example. This is an at-will (in most cases) relationship with your employer. The social credit system is a relationship with the government, and the services it provides.

Because the two are different, the social credit system should not be dinged because of whistleblowing a private company / badmouthing a manager. It would make sense if you are working for the government, however.

I think it was used on Alex Jones sites as a counterpoint to Obama care, when it was merely a campaign promise in 2008

Its an OOLLD video

It had pictures of some clerk checking your information in some Windows ME interface

I've also lived in very corrupt societies etc. This can be done right. I'm sure of it. I guess we'll see in the next ten years or so.

First hand experience with corruption?

See also: communism, nuclear physics, and cryptography.

Because of basic concepts like fundamental human rights, privacy, and other things guaranteed by documents like the US constitution, bill of rights, various constitutional amendments, and other documents such as Canada's charter of rights and freedoms. If your comment is not entirely satire, I'm appalled that I even needed to type this reply.

I hesitate to make too many assumptions as to what you’re missing, but perhaps you aren’t distinguishing between government actors and private matters?

For example, we generally believe those who wield power over the citizenry should be as transparent as possible—this is the only way we (the citizenry) can make informed decisions about those leaders. If we don’t know what the leaders are actually doing, we are literally incapable of making informed decisions.

We also generally believe the opposite is true for the citizenry, that we should have as much privacy as possible. We believe this because it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to set roots if it knows everything about the citizenry.

The most powerful should be held accountable to an informed citizenry. This is one of the ways we try to maintain balance and prevent abuses by that power.

Maybe think of privacy like closet space? You might not need what you have right now, but you wouldn't want to share it with the world either, would you?

Information asymmetry is power. Usually the less powerful use this asymmetry to their advantage. Would you play poker with an opponent that could see your hand?

Second and more cultural is that western societies do not trust governments. This has nothing to do with the atrocities of the 20th century but actually the objection to the old monarchys. America was basically created out of this objection to government.

Do you want the government, your employer, family to know what porn you watch and how often?