“In a contentious world first, China plans to implement a social credit system (officially referred to as a Social Credit Score or SCS) by 2020. The idea first appeared in a document from the State Council of China published in June 2014. It is a technological advancement so shocking to modern-minded paradigms that many can do little but sit back in defeatist chagrin as science fiction shows us its darker side. The SCS seems relatively simple. Every citizen in China, which now has numbers swelling to well over 1.3 billion, would be given a score that, as a matter of public record, is available for all to see. This citizen score comes from monitoring an individual’s social behavior—from their spending habits and how regularly they pay bills, to their social interactions—and it’ll become the basis of that person’s trustworthiness, which would also be publicly ranked. This actually sounds worse than an Orwellian nightmare. A citizen’s score affects their eligibility for a number of services, including the kinds of jobs or mortgages they can get, and it also impacts what schools their children qualify for. China’s SCS proves reality is darker than fiction. The government also says that this will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step,’ according to The Wall Street Journal. The major issue is this: the SCS goes well beyond just rating one’s ability to manage debt; in essence, it puts a number on a citizen rating their worth as a human being—and it forces others to respect that rating. ‘China’s proposed social score is an absolute reaffirmation of China continuing to push forward to be a complete police state,’ said Anurag Lal, former Director of the U.S. National Broadband Task Force for the FCC under the Obama administration and president and CEO of mobility solutions firm Infinite Convergence, in an email to Futurism. ‘They take it a step further by becoming not only an establishment of a totalitarian police state that monitors its people but one that completely evades users’ privacy. All forms of activity and interactions, online or otherwise, will be rated, available to view and stored as data.’ Ultimately, the problem is that ‘socially acceptable behavior’ will be defined by the Chinese government, not a democratic process or an objective panel. And punitive measures will certainly be taken when a person breaks this trust. With the SCS, the Chinese government will actually hit two birds with one stone: They will have a way of promoting and enforcing what they consider to be ‘socially acceptable behavior,’ and they will have a way of monitoring virtually all aspects of citizens’ lives.” “China’s Social Credit System,” futurism.com, Dec. 2, 2017 Comments are closed.
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