China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy

CBS New York (April 24, 2018) reported that China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy.

China Determines Your Standing Through Use Of Surveillance Video, Plans To Have 600 Million Cameras By 2020. China is rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave. Every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score - a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it. China’s growing network of surveillance cameras makes all of this possible.

How far into people’s daily mundane activities does this go? No doubt, the government and the people running the plan would like it to go as deeply as possible to determine how to allocate benefits and also how to impact and shape their behavior. How the new scoring system truly works is kept secret and could be easily abused by the government. The fear, of course, it that the government may use this social credit scoring system to punish people that it deems not sufficiently loyal to the communist party. And trying to clear your name or fight your score is nearly impossible, because there’s no due process.

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China provides an extreme example of where many other governments and government agencies would like to go. The ability to totally monitor citizens' activities, and to take adverse action as the result of on-going investigations, or even bogus allegations and false reports made by government employees, is a serious problem.