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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and that's fine. Especially for corporations and other fictitious entities. It's the highly personal aspects of this system that disgust me. The personal habits and nickel-and-dime shit that it vacuums up to determine a score.

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While not an expert myself, when I have looked deeper into the reporting that makes claims like this, I often find that they're speculating based on one-off statements, not describing an actual extant system. I feel like the US media, even the most respectable publications, don't take appropriate care to separate fact from fiction re: social credit.

For example, I found this article really surprising: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social...

Honest question, isn't this same big data technical effort supporting the round up of Uighurs[1]?

I get that the main story is about a debtor and credit, but the concept of stratification based on surveilence-data is word-for-word 1984.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

Rounding up Uyghurs doesn't require fancy big data at all. Everyone's ethnicity is already recorded on their national ID card, and by now that information can be expected to be digitized and easily searchable. To get a phone number, you need to register with your ID, so the government gets location tracking basically for free.

All of that is a completely different technical effort to the credit blacklist discussed here.

Well, what I'm saying is that I'm not certain that the social credit system is actually an effort to surveil and stratify all people in China. My understanding is that, in its current form, it only targets irresponsible business owners.

The Uighur roundup - that just sounds like standard colonialist violence to me. I don't see how it's specifically a 'big data' issue, nor how it's related to social credit.

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