China’s development of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses and even government officials could spread to the West and change the lives of many for years to come, The Atlantic reports.
The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim is to judge the trustworthiness of the country’s 1.3 billion residents by monitoring and evaluating their purchases, who their friends are, how much time they spend watching TV or playing video games, what bills and taxes they pay (or don’t) and where they are at any given time.
Launched in 2012, the initiative plans to “make trustworthy people benefit everywhere and untrustworthy people restricted everywhere” by the time it is fully implemented.
Li Xiaolin learned the consequences of being listed as untrustworthy. The lawyer in 2016 was banned from purchasing a plane ticket because a court found his apology letter “insincere” and placed him on a list of “untrustworthy” people. It took three weeks before an official spoke to him about how to be removed.
“It’s not hard to see how such restrictions, applied broadly enough, would put an effective brake on nonconforming behaviors — or even the expression of nonconforming opinions,” writes the Atlantic’s Adam Greenfield.
Mimicking the project in the West would be easy since technology continues to become a bigger part of our lives.
“It would be remarkably easy to achieve. It’s just a matter of making explicit the determinations that already go into credit scores — of binding together the data brokerages that even now siphon up public records, social-media profiles, web searches, and similar digital traces of life here in the West, and making our rights and privileges as city dwellers and citizens contingent on what they infer from our behavior,” writes Greenfield.
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