Thanks to information from “big data” that reveals purchasing habits, online comments, and more, Chinese citizens will now receive a credit rating based on more than just their ability to afford things and pay back debts.
In what is being called a “social credit system,” Chinese citizens will receive a credit score between 350 and 950. What determines your credit rating under this system includes what you buy. Buying video games negatively affects your credit rating. Buying household appliances or baby products positively affects your rating. The system also monitors what you post on social media sites, specifically politically-minded content without prior permission. Pirate party founder Rick Falkvinge adds, “talking about or describing a different history than the official one, or even publishing accurate up-to-date news from the Shanghai stock market collapse (which was and is embarrassing to the Chinese regime)” can negatively affect your credit rating.
“With the help of the latest internet technologies the government wants to exercise individual surveillance,” said Belgian China-specialist at Oxford University Rogier Creemers. “Government and big internet companies in China can exploit ‘Big Data’ together in a way that is unimaginable in the West.”
The system will be run by two companies: Alibaba, a shopping website, and Tencent, a social network. Alibaba and Tencent also manage all social networks in China. The latter part means that China will “have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.”
Chinese internet specialist at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs Johan Lagerkvist calls the system “very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behavior and what books people read. It’s Amazon’s consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley calls this new credit program “nightmarish” and “a warning for Americans.” He believes that while the U.S. government is unlikely to create a similar credit program, “there are consistent gravitational pulls toward this kind of behavior on the part of many public and private U.S. bureaucracies, and a very real danger that many of the dynamics we see in the Chinese system will emerge here over time.”
In other Chinese video game news, late last year, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita became region-free in China, while the Xbox One remains region-locked, and a China-specific version of Borderlands, Borderlands Online, was released earlier this year.
Source: Computer World, Image via Tech in Asia
