China has plans to implement a social credit system that would essentially rank its citizens as good or bad. This social credit system will inhibit bad citizens from doing things like booking travel throughout the country or make it impossible to get a loan until their scores improve. Your score is also able to be monitored by other citizens, enabling people to keep each other in check by reporting violations or acts of good. Companies are also able to contribute to a citizen’s social credit score by using their extensive backlogs of data. Things such as how long you play video games are tracked on company servers and can badly affect your score. Lastly, the government also obviously has ways to affect your score. Facial recognition and cameras that can identify you by the way you walk are planned to be used to affect your score. If these cameras see you doing bad acts in public, such as jaywalking, your score will again be negatively affected.
There are many problems that I have with this kind of system. The main issue that I have with it is that who defines what is good, and what is bad. Presumably, it’s the government, but why is their ideal being projected onto society. It will limit individuality, forcing people to conform in fear of repercussions. These new technologies have a lot of dangerous potentials that we need to, as a world, decide if we are comfortable with them being used like this.
Sources:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained
https://www.apnews.com/bf75dd1c26c947b7826d270a16e2658a
This article showcases how digital technology can be used against society, especially in a country with such government restrictions. This reminded me of a Black Mirror episode where people would rate other individuals from no starts to 5 stars, and depending on how much you accumulated the more access you received. The system that would be used must have access to different forms of technologies, ranging from facial recognition to users entering data themselves. A serious breach of security can be possible if individuals are desperate enough to “increase” their rating to gain more access. Also, this idea of the government determining good and bad doesn’t necessarily define the individual itself and their capabilities. It’s something to keep in mind when looking at the larger picture of things.