China prepares to digitally profile and rate its citizens

[Tony Gosling]

Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

The Chinese government plans to launch its Social 
Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the 
trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents

By 
<http://www.wired.co.uk/article/http://www.wired.co.uk/profile/rachel-botsman>RACHEL 
BOTSMAN    http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=177561#177561

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Saturday 21 October 2017

On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China 
published an ominous-sounding document called 
"Planning Outline for the Construction of a 
Social Credit System". In the way of Chinese 
policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry 
affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if 
there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?

Imagine a world where many of your daily 
activities were constantly monitored and 
evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; 
where you are at any given time; who your friends 
are and how you interact with them; how many 
hours you spend watching content or playing video 
games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). 
It's not hard to picture, because most of that 
already happens, thanks to all those 
data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook 
and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as 
Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these 
behaviours are rated as either positive or 
negative and distilled into a single number, 
according to rules set by the government. That 
would create your Citizen Score and it would tell 
everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. 
Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked 
against that of the entire population and used to 
determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a 
job, where your children can go to school - or 
even just your chances of getting a date.

Emacs!



A futuristic vision of Big Brother out of 
control? No, it's already getting underway in 
China, where the government is developing the 
Social Credit System (SCS) to rate the 
trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. The 
Chinese government is pitching the system as a 
desirable way to measure and enhance "trust" 
nationwide and to build a culture of "sincerity". 
As the policy states, "It will forge a public 
opinion environment where keeping trust is 
glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in 
government affairs, commercial sincerity, social 
sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility."

Propaganda

Others are less sanguine about its wider purpose. 
"It is very ambitious in both depth and scope, 
including scrutinising individual behaviour and 
what books people are reading. It's Amazon's 
consumer tracking with an Orwellian political 
twist," is how Johan Lagerkvist, a Chinese 
internet specialist at the Swedish Institute of 
International Affairs, described the social 
credit system. Rogier Creemers, a post-doctoral 
scholar specialising in Chinese law and 
governance at the Van Vollenhoven Institute at 
Leiden University, who published a comprehensive 
translation of the plan, compared it to "Yelp 
reviews with the nanny state watching over your shoulder".

For now, technically, participating in China's 
Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will 
be mandatory. The behaviour of every single 
citizen and legal person (which includes every 
company or other entity)in China will be rated 
and ranked, whether they like it or not.

Kevin Hong

Prior to its national roll-out in 2020, the 
Chinese government is taking a watch-and-learn 
approach. In this marriage between communist 
oversight and capitalist can-do, the government 
has given a licence to eight private companies to 
come up with systems and algorithms for social 
credit scores. Predictably, data giants currently 
run two of the best-known projects.

The first is with China Rapid Finance, a partner 
of the social-network behemoth Tencent and 
developer of the messaging app WeChat with more 
than 850 million active users. The other, Sesame 
Credit, is run by the Ant Financial Services 
Group (AFSG), an affiliate company of Alibaba. 
Ant Financial sells insurance products and 
provides loans to small- to medium-sized 
businesses. However, the real star of Ant is 
AliPay, its payments arm that people use not only 
to buy things online, but also for restaurants, 
taxis, school fees, cinema tickets and even to transfer money to each other.

Sesame Credit has also teamed up with other 
data-generating platforms, such as Didi Chuxing, 
the ride-hailing company that was Uber's main 
competitor in China before it acquired the 
American company's Chinese operations in 2016, 
and Baihe, the country's largest online 
matchmaking service. It's not hard to see how 
that all adds up to gargantuan amounts of big 
data that Sesame Credit can tap into to assess 
how people behave and rate them accordingly.

So just how are people rated? Individuals on 
Sesame Credit are measured by a score ranging 
between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba does not 
divulge the "complex algorithm" it uses to 
calculate the number but they do reveal the five 
factors taken into account. The first is credit 
history. For example, does the citizen pay their 
electricity or phone bill on time? Next is 
fulfilment capacity, which it defines in its 
guidelines as "a user's ability to fulfil his/her 
contract obligations". The third factor is 
personal characteristics, verifying personal 
information such as someone's mobile phone number 
and address. But the fourth category, behaviour 
and preference, is where it gets interesting.

Under this system, something as innocuous as a 
person's shopping habits become a measure of 
character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the 
types of products they buy. "Someone who plays 
video games for ten hours a day, for example, 
would be considered an idle person," says Li 
Yingyun, Sesame's Technology Director. "Someone 
who frequently buys diapers would be considered 
as probably a parent, who on balance is more 
likely to have a sense of responsibility." So the 
system not only investigates behaviour - it 
shapes it. It "nudges" citizens away from 
purchases and behaviours the government does not like.

Friends matter, too. The fifth category is 
interpersonal relationships. What does their 
choice of online friends and their interactions 
say about the person being assessed? Sharing what 
Sesame Credit refers to as "positive energy" 
online, nice messages about the government or how 
well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up.

Alibaba is adamant that, currently, anything 
negative posted on social media does not affect 
scores (we don't know if this is true or not 
because the algorithm is secret). But you can see 
how this might play out when the government's own 
citizen score system officially launches in 2020. 
Even though there is no suggestion yet that any 
of the eight private companies involved in the 
ongoing pilot scheme will be ultimately 
responsible for running the government's own 
system, it's hard to believe that the government 
will not want to extract the maximum amount of 
data for its SCS, from the pilots. If that 
happens, and continues as the new normal under 
the government's own SCS it will result in 
private platforms acting essentially as spy 
agencies for the government. They may have no choice.

Posting dissenting political opinions or links 
mentioning Tiananmen Square has never been wise 
in China, but now it could directly hurt a 
citizen's rating. But here's the real kicker: a 
person's own score will also be affected by what 
their online friends say and do, beyond their own 
contact with them. If someone they are connected 
to online posts a negative comment, their own score will also be dragged down.

So why have millions of people already signed up 
to what amounts to a trial run for a publicly 
endorsed government surveillance system? There 
may be darker, unstated reasons - fear of 
reprisals, for instance, for those who don't put 
their hand up - but there is also a lure, in the 
form of rewards and "special privileges" for 
those citizens who prove themselves to be "trustworthy" on Sesame Credit.

If their score reaches 600, they can take out a 
Just Spend loan of up to 5,000 yuan (around £565) 
to use to shop online, as long as it's on an 
Alibaba site. Reach 650 points, they may rent a 
car without leaving a deposit. They are also 
entitled to faster check-in at hotels and use of 
the VIP check-in at Beijing Capital International 
Airport. Those with more than 666 points can get 
a cash loan of up to 50,000 yuan (£5,700), 
obviously from Ant Financial Services. Get above 
700 and they can apply for Singapore travel 
without supporting documents such as an employee 
letter. And at 750, they get fast-tracked 
application to a coveted pan-European Schengen 
visa. "I think the best way to understand the 
system is as a sort of bastard love child of a loyalty scheme," says Creemers.

Higher scores have already become a status 
symbol, with almost 100,000 people bragging about 
their scores on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of 
Twitter) within months of launch. A citizen's 
score can even affect their odds of getting a 
date, or a marriage partner, because the higher 
their Sesame rating, the more prominent their dating profile is on Baihe.

Sesame Credit already offers tips to help 
individuals improve their ranking, including 
warning about the downsides of friending someone 
who has a low score. This might lead to the rise 
of score advisers, who will share tips on how to 
gain points, or reputation consultants willing to 
offer expert advice on how to strategically 
improve a ranking or get off the trust-breaking blacklist.

Indeed, the government's Social Credit System is 
basically a big data gamified version of the 
Communist Party's surveillance methods; the 
disquieting dang'an. The regime kept a dossier on 
every individual that tracked political and 
personal transgressions. A citizen's dang'an 
followed them for life, from schools to jobs. 
People started reporting on friends and even 
family members, raising suspicion and lowering 
social trust in China. The same thing will happen 
with digital dossiers. People will have an 
incentive to say to their friends and family, 
"Don't post that. I don't want you to hurt your 
score but I also don't want you to hurt mine."

We're also bound to see the birth of reputation 
black markets selling under-the-counter ways to 
boost trustworthiness. In the same way that 
Facebook Likes and Twitter followers can be 
bought, individuals will pay to manipulate their 
score. What about keeping the system secure? 
Hackers (some even state-backed) could change or 
steal the digitally stored information.
"People with low ratings will have slower 
internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants 
and the removal of the right to travel"

----------
Rachel Botsman, author of ‘Who Can You Trust?’

The new system reflects a cunning paradigm shift. 
As we've noted, instead of trying to enforce 
stability or conformity with a big stick and a 
good dose of top-down fear, the government is 
attempting to make obedience feel like gaming. It 
is a method of social control dressed up in some 
points-reward system. It's gamified obedience.

In a trendy neighbourhood in downtown Beijing, 
the BBC news services hit the streets in October 
2015 to ask people about their Sesame Credit 
ratings. Most spoke about the upsides. But then, 
who would publicly criticise the system? Ding, 
your score might go down. Alarmingly, few people 
understood that a bad score could hurt them in 
the future. Even more concerning was how many 
people had no idea that they were being rated.

Currently, Sesame Credit does not directly 
penalise people for being "untrustworthy" - it's 
more effective to lock people in with treats for 
good behaviour. But Hu Tao, Sesame Credit's chief 
manager, warns people that the system is designed 
so that "untrustworthy people can't rent a car, 
can't borrow money or even can't find a job". She 
has even disclosed that Sesame Credit has 
approached China's Education Bureau about sharing 
a list of its students who cheated on national 
examinations, in order to make them pay into the future for their dishonesty.

Penalties are set to change dramatically when the 
government system becomes mandatory in 2020. 
Indeed, on September 25, 2016, the State Council 
General Office updated its policy entitled 
"Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons 
Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking". The 
overriding principle is simple: "If trust is 
broken in one place, restrictions are imposed 
everywhere," the policy document states.

For instance, people with low ratings will have 
slower internet speeds; restricted access to 
restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the 
removal of the right to travel freely abroad 
with, I quote, "restrictive control on 
consumption within holiday areas or travel 
businesses". Scores will influence a person's 
rental applications, their ability to get 
insurance or a loan and even social-security 
benefits. Citizens with low scores will not be 
hired by certain employers and will be forbidden 
from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil 
service, journalism and legal fields, where of 
course you must be deemed trustworthy. Low-rating 
citizens will also be restricted when it comes to 
enrolling themselves or their children in 
high-paying private schools. I am not fabricating 
this list of punishments. It's the reality 
Chinese citizens will face. As the government 
document states, the social credit system will 
"allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under 
heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step".

According to Luciano Floridi, a professor of 
philosophy and ethics of information at the 
University of Oxford and the director of research 
at the Oxford Internet Institute, there have been 
three critical "de-centering shifts" that have 
altered our view in self-understanding: 
Copernicus's model of the Earth orbiting the Sun; 
Darwin's theory of natural selection; and Freud's 
claim that our daily actions are controlled by the unconscious mind.

Floridi believes we are now entering the fourth 
shift, as what we do online and offline merge 
into an onlife. He asserts that, as our society 
increasingly becomes an infosphere, a mixture of 
physical and virtual experiences, we are 
acquiring an onlife personality - different from 
who we innately are in the "real world" alone. We 
see this writ large on Facebook, where people 
present an edited or idealised portrait of their 
lives. Think about your Uber experiences. Are you 
just a little bit nicer to the driver because you 
know you will be rated? But Uber ratings are 
nothing compared to Peeple, an app launched in 
March 2016, which is like a Yelp for humans. It 
allows you to assign ratings and reviews to 
everyone you know - your spouse, neighbour, boss 
and even your ex. A profile displays a "Peeple 
Number", a score based on all the feedback and 
recommendations you receive. Worryingly, once 
your name is in the Peeple system, it's there for good. You can't opt out.

Peeple has forbidden certain bad behaviours 
including mentioning private health conditions, 
making profanities or being sexist (however you 
objectively assess that). But there are few rules 
on how people are graded or standards about transparency.

China's trust system might be voluntary as yet, 
but it's already having consequences. In February 
2017, the country's Supreme People's Court 
announced that 6.15 million of its citizens had 
been banned from taking flights over the past 
four years for social misdeeds. The ban is being 
pointed to as a step toward blacklisting in the 
SCS. "We have signed a memorandum
 [with over] 44 
government departments in order to limit 
'discredited' people on multiple levels," says 
Meng Xiang, head of the executive department of 
the Supreme Court. Another 1.65 million blacklisted people cannot take trains.

Where these systems really descend into 
nightmarish territory is that the trust 
algorithms used are unfairly reductive. They 
don't take into account context. For instance, 
one person might miss paying a bill or a fine 
because they were in hospital; another may simply 
be a freeloader. And therein lies the challenge 
facing all of us in the digital world, and not 
just the Chinese. If life-determining algorithms 
are here to stay, we need to figure out how they 
can embrace the nuances, inconsistencies and 
contradictions inherent in human beings and how they can reflect real life.

Kevin Hong

You could see China's so-called trust plan as 
Orwell's 1984 meets Pavlov's dogs. Act like a 
good citizen, be rewarded and be made to think 
you're having fun. It's worth remembering, 
however, that personal scoring systems have been 
present in the west for decades.

More than 70 years ago, two men called Bill Fair 
and Earl Isaac invented credit scores. Today, 
companies use FICO scores to determine many 
financial decisions, including the interest rate 
on our mortgage or whether we should be given a loan.

For the majority of Chinese people, they have 
never had credit scores and so they can't get 
credit. "Many people don't own houses, cars or 
credit cards in China, so that kind of 
information isn't available to measure," explains 
Wen Quan, an influential blogger who writes about 
technology and finance. "The central bank has the 
financial data from 800 million people, but only 
320 million have a traditional credit history." 
According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, 
the annual economic loss caused by lack of credit 
information is more than 600 billion yuan (£68bn).

China's lack of a national credit system is why 
the government is adamant that Citizen Scores are 
long overdue and badly needed to fix what they 
refer to as a "trust deficit". In a poorly 
regulated market, the sale of counterfeit and 
substandard products is a massive problem. 
According to the Organization for Economic 
Co-operation and Development (OECD), 63 per cent 
of all fake goods, from watches to handbags to 
baby food, originate from China. "The level of 
micro corruption is enormous," Creemers says. "So 
if this particular scheme results in more 
effective oversight and accountability, it will likely be warmly welcomed."

The government also argues that the system is a 
way to bring in those people left out of 
traditional credit systems, such as students and 
low-income households. Professor Wang Shuqin from 
the Office of Philosophy and Social Science at 
Capital Normal University in China recently won 
the bid to help the government develop the system 
that she refers to as "China's Social Faithful 
System". Without such a mechanism, doing business 
in China is risky, she stresses, as about half of 
the signed contracts are not kept. "Given the 
speed of the digital economy it's crucial that 
people can quickly verify each other's credit 
worthiness," she says. "The behaviour of the 
majority is determined by their world of 
thoughts. A person who believes in socialist core 
values is behaving more decently." She regards 
the "moral standards" the system assesses, as 
well as financial data, as a bonus.

Indeed, the State Council's aim is to raise the 
"honest mentality and credit levels of the entire 
society" in order to improve "the overall 
competitiveness of the country". Is it possible 
that the SCS is in fact a more desirably 
transparent approach to surveillance in a country 
that has a long history of watching its citizens? 
"As a Chinese person, knowing that everything I 
do online is being tracked, would I rather be 
aware of the details of what is being monitored 
and use this information to teach myself how to 
abide by the rules?" says Rasul Majid, a Chinese 
blogger based in Shanghai who writes about 
behavioural design and gaming psychology. "Or 
would I rather live in ignorance and 
hope/wish/dream that personal privacy still 
exists and that our ruling bodies respect us 
enough not to take advantage?" Put simply, Majid 
thinks the system gives him a tiny bit more control over his data.

When I tell westerners about the Social Credit 
System in China, their responses are fervent and 
visceral. Yet we already rate restaurants, 
movies, books and even doctors. Facebook, 
meanwhile, is now capable of identifying you in 
pictures without seeing your face; it only needs 
your clothes, hair and body type to tag you in an 
image with 83 per cent accuracy.

In 2015, the OECD published a study revealing 
that in the US there are at least 24.9 connected 
devices per 100 inhabitants. All kinds of 
companies scrutinise the "big data" emitted from 
these devices to understand our lives and 
desires, and to predict our actions in ways that 
we couldn't even predict ourselves.

Governments around the world are already in the 
business of monitoring and rating. In the US, the 
National Security Agency (NSA) is not the only 
official digital eye following the movements of 
its citizens. In 2015, the US Transportation 
Security Administration proposed the idea of 
expanding the PreCheck background checks to 
include social-media records, location data and 
purchase history. The idea was scrapped after 
heavy criticism, but that doesn't mean it's dead. 
We already live in a world of predictive 
algorithms that determine if we are a threat, a 
risk, a good citizen and even if we are 
trustworthy. We're getting closer to the Chinese 
system - the expansion of credit scoring into 
life scoring - even if we don't know we are.

So are we heading for a future where we will all 
be branded online and data-mined? It's certainly 
trending that way. Barring some kind of mass 
citizen revolt to wrench back privacy, we are 
entering an age where an individual's actions 
will be judged by standards they can't control 
and where that judgement can't be erased. The 
consequences are not only troubling; they're 
permanent. Forget the right to delete or to be 
forgotten, to be young and foolish.

While it might be too late to stop this new era, 
we do have choices and rights we can exert now. 
For one thing, we need to be able rate the 
raters. In his book The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly 
describes a future where the watchers and the 
watched will transparently track each other. "Our 
central choice now is whether this surveillance 
is a secret, one-way panopticon - or a mutual, 
transparent kind of 'coveillance' that involves 
watching the watchers," he writes.

Our trust should start with individuals within 
government (or whoever is controlling the 
system). We need trustworthy mechanisms to make 
sure ratings and data are used responsibly and 
with our permission. To trust the system, we need 
to reduce the unknowns. That means taking steps 
to reduce the opacity of the algorithms. The 
argument against mandatory disclosures is that if 
you know what happens under the hood, the system 
could become rigged or hacked. But if humans are 
being reduced to a rating that could 
significantly impact their lives, there must be 
transparency in how the scoring works.

In China, certain citizens, such as government 
officials, will likely be deemed above the 
system. What will be the public reaction when 
their unfavourable actions don't affect their 
score? We could see a Panama Papers 3.0 for reputation fraud.

It is still too early to know how a culture of 
constant monitoring plus rating will turn out. 
What will happen when these systems, charting the 
social, moral and financial history of an entire 
population, come into full force? How much 
further will privacy and freedom of speech (long 
under siege in China) be eroded? Who will decide 
which way the system goes? These are questions we 
all need to consider, and soon. Today China, 
tomorrow a place near you. The real questions 
about the future of trust are not technological or economic; they are ethical.

If we are not vigilant, distributed trust could 
become networked shame. Life will become an 
endless popularity contest, with us all vying for 
the highest rating that only a few can attain.

This is an extract from 
<http://www.wired.co.uk/article/https://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Can-You-Trust-Technology/dp/024129617X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=>Who 
Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together 
and Why It Might Drive Us Apart (Penguin 
Portfolio) by Rachel Botsman, published on 
October 4. Since this piece was written, The 
People's Bank of China delayed the licences to 
the eight companies conducting social credit 
pilots. The government's plans to launch the 
Social Credit System in 2020 remain unchanged
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'From South America, where payment must be made with subtlety, the 
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again, and the pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an Argentinian safe haven, 
protected by the most efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.'
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