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Americans really shouldn't be commenting on the credit system of other countries...

• cromwellian 9y ago
  Why not? Because our's is very bad? Why does that preclude one from commenting on any credit system around the world? It's standard practice on HackerNews to comment on surveillance and tracking systems in general and point out the dangers of them. There are lots of European commentators discussing US government policy, and vice versa. All criticism is fair, where you are born or what your government has done in the past doesn't invalidate one's opinion. There's too much nationalism sensitivity in these kinds of discussions when someone takes offense to someone else criticizing their country. There are some aspects of China's proposal which are good in regards to giving scores to businesses in an effort to regulate them, similar to independent reputation systems in the West, but it is the promises of "holistic rating of character" they've made and the comments about introduction of big data deep learning techniques that have people concerned. Even if intentions were completely benign, you could end up with something very bad. The idea of using surveillance capitalism in a multipolar system is one thing, especially if there is a very transparent dispute system, but using it at the state level should scare everyone. People complain about being ruined by small tweaks to Google's ranking algorithm, but having a single ranking instituted by a government monopoly would be inescapable.