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> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn would feed i

by lispm 9y ago

> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn would feed into their credit ratings The wet dream of an authoritarian government.

ldp01 9y ago
Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness? What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?
- lispm 9y ago
  They factor in whether you are a rule obeying good citizem. The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
  - e4r5t6 9y ago
    Is Liu Xiaobo regarded as rule obeying good citizen?
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      Obviously not, not harmonious enough. But social rating is not for actual opposition activists who will be jailed/tortured/disappeared even without it - it is for the tens of millions of common citizens who might sympathise with them and for whom a credit rating penalty might make them think twice about expressing their support or sympathy or outrage about the injustice.
- Inconel 9y ago
  I'm fairly certain I read that this system will also allow citizens to assign trustworthiness scores to friends and acquaintances.
  - provost 9y ago
    > Credit scoring companies in the US and China are already experimenting with data from social media profiles. Counting how many times someone says “wasted” in their Facebook status can help to predict whether they will repay their debts on time, according to a trial by US credit analyst FICO. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
    - Inconel 9y ago
      That's pretty unsettling. I wonder if I'm going to find myself in a similar situation regarding social networking as I found myself in regarding credit cards a number of years ago. For the longest time I didn't have any credit cards since the idea of debt really scared me but I realized I was only hurting myself by not building a credit history. I signed up for a number of cards over the years and put small recurring charges on them that I always pay off in full. Similarly, I don't really participate in much social media, HN is the exception, and I have no FB account, but I wonder if at some point my lack of public facing social media will negatively impact other areas of my life like borrowing, employment, or housing. Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
      - che_shirecat 9y ago
        The sort of profiling the parent comment was talking about doesn't work the other way around - it'd be idiotic to punish someone's credit score for not having a social media account or having it set to private/friends-only/un-crawlable. The lack of a social media account might even be a signal of better creditworthiness
      - ethbro 9y ago
        I see bots being extraordinarily effective against this type of automated scoring as the sophistication of the scoring bot seems like it will always lag potential creator bots. Given that scoring bots in mass use will necessarily decrease the dimensionality of the data into fewer, more tractable features, and thus creating bots need only to target the dimensionality-reduction step, rather than reproduce "human behavior." Which seems rather simple given the variance in natural language and normal human social interaction.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Conformity. Those who have the right harmonious thinking are more likely to be successful and less likely to be sent to jail for political crimes. The government thinks they control the rules of the entire game. Also, if you have a bad credit score, you won't be able to buy train or plane tickets in china. It just isn't about your ability to get a loan.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    I've seen the "Social Credit System" discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    move to digital currency and they; or any other government for that matter; prevent you directly from providing or consuming goods and services. So combine both elements, a government controlled "score" plus digital currency and they will control the game. Then it comes down to, can barter even exist.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Credit rating are ironically based on taking up debt to show that you can deal with debt. There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back. So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
- zhte415 9y ago
  Credit ratings are given by credit ratings agencies. Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest. Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity. In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
- candiodari 9y ago
  It's not about making credit rating more reliable, rather the opposite. It's about sabotaging the people they want sabotaged. Wrong ethnic group perhaps, or wrote a dissenting article ? No more loans or even anything but cash for you !
ThomPete 9y ago
It's actually explored in an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive. Pretty convincing and scary.
- dave_sullivan 9y ago
  I thought Nosedive was more of a "Look what we might turn into" thing. The government didn't have much to do with it (except dragging her away when she has a knife). It was a defacto dystopia. For instance, that truck driver who ditches the system isn't getting tortured as a dissident by the gov. China's vision is much worse. * Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020. * The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. * In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse. * It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores. * Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it. * Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa. * Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia-c.html http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
  - taneq 9y ago
    Let me guess, scores above 950 are reserved for heads of state, and anyone with a score below 350 is executed?
77pt77 9y ago
Last time I spoke to a native Chinese about that he said he was not worried at all and said that the worries in the west were tremendously overblown.
- Talyen42 9y ago
  he sounds like someone with a high Trustworthy Score(tm)!
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    Well, he was studying in the West and was travelling alone at that time. Surely that's a bit "deviant".
    - dmoy 9y ago
      No that's about par for the course for the rich ruling generation's kids. Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).

by lispm 9y ago

ldp01 9y ago

Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness? What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?

lispm 9y ago
They factor in whether you are a rule obeying good citizem. The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
- e4r5t6 9y ago
  Is Liu Xiaobo regarded as rule obeying good citizen?
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    Obviously not, not harmonious enough. But social rating is not for actual opposition activists who will be jailed/tortured/disappeared even without it - it is for the tens of millions of common citizens who might sympathise with them and for whom a credit rating penalty might make them think twice about expressing their support or sympathy or outrage about the injustice.
Inconel 9y ago
I'm fairly certain I read that this system will also allow citizens to assign trustworthiness scores to friends and acquaintances.
- provost 9y ago
  > Credit scoring companies in the US and China are already experimenting with data from social media profiles. Counting how many times someone says “wasted” in their Facebook status can help to predict whether they will repay their debts on time, according to a trial by US credit analyst FICO. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
  - Inconel 9y ago
    That's pretty unsettling. I wonder if I'm going to find myself in a similar situation regarding social networking as I found myself in regarding credit cards a number of years ago. For the longest time I didn't have any credit cards since the idea of debt really scared me but I realized I was only hurting myself by not building a credit history. I signed up for a number of cards over the years and put small recurring charges on them that I always pay off in full. Similarly, I don't really participate in much social media, HN is the exception, and I have no FB account, but I wonder if at some point my lack of public facing social media will negatively impact other areas of my life like borrowing, employment, or housing. Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
    - che_shirecat 9y ago
      The sort of profiling the parent comment was talking about doesn't work the other way around - it'd be idiotic to punish someone's credit score for not having a social media account or having it set to private/friends-only/un-crawlable. The lack of a social media account might even be a signal of better creditworthiness
    - ethbro 9y ago
      I see bots being extraordinarily effective against this type of automated scoring as the sophistication of the scoring bot seems like it will always lag potential creator bots. Given that scoring bots in mass use will necessarily decrease the dimensionality of the data into fewer, more tractable features, and thus creating bots need only to target the dimensionality-reduction step, rather than reproduce "human behavior." Which seems rather simple given the variance in natural language and normal human social interaction.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Conformity. Those who have the right harmonious thinking are more likely to be successful and less likely to be sent to jail for political crimes. The government thinks they control the rules of the entire game. Also, if you have a bad credit score, you won't be able to buy train or plane tickets in china. It just isn't about your ability to get a loan.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I've seen the "Social Credit System" discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  move to digital currency and they; or any other government for that matter; prevent you directly from providing or consuming goods and services. So combine both elements, a government controlled "score" plus digital currency and they will control the game. Then it comes down to, can barter even exist.
ThomPete 9y ago
Credit rating are ironically based on taking up debt to show that you can deal with debt. There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back. So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
zhte415 9y ago
Credit ratings are given by credit ratings agencies. Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest. Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity. In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
candiodari 9y ago
It's not about making credit rating more reliable, rather the opposite. It's about sabotaging the people they want sabotaged. Wrong ethnic group perhaps, or wrote a dissenting article ? No more loans or even anything but cash for you !

ThomPete 9y ago

It's actually explored in an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive. Pretty convincing and scary.

dave_sullivan 9y ago
I thought Nosedive was more of a "Look what we might turn into" thing. The government didn't have much to do with it (except dragging her away when she has a knife). It was a defacto dystopia. For instance, that truck driver who ditches the system isn't getting tortured as a dissident by the gov. China's vision is much worse. * Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020. * The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. * In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse. * It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores. * Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it. * Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa. * Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia-c.html http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
- taneq 9y ago
  Let me guess, scores above 950 are reserved for heads of state, and anyone with a score below 350 is executed?

77pt77 9y ago

Last time I spoke to a native Chinese about that he said he was not worried at all and said that the worries in the west were tremendously overblown.

Talyen42 9y ago
he sounds like someone with a high Trustworthy Score(tm)!
- 77pt77 9y ago
  Well, he was studying in the West and was travelling alone at that time. Surely that's a bit "deviant".
  - dmoy 9y ago
    No that's about par for the course for the rich ruling generation's kids. Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).