4 ms·

Ask HN: How to protect against future cancellation and social credit systems?

I'm increasingly worried about being cancelled or wrongly flagged by a social credit system in near future. I've started minimising what I share, limiting scope of my personal opinions, moving close people to privacy friendly platforms to chat about any sensitive topics, scrubbing old information, using cash and setting up basic privacy hygiene.

night-rider 4y ago
These are the golden days, so relish them. The measures you take of not being so casual with what you share are basic information hygiene that everyone should be doing already. There’s already ‘social cooling’ happening, but hard to say if a China style credit system would hit the West soon. But if it does, there are plenty of tools to go dark and circumvent that. Check out Privacy Guides and pick a few tools you can use.
- night-rider 4y ago
  https://www.privacyguides.org/ https://www.privacyguides.org/
- throwcancelling 4y ago
  > China style credit system would hit the West soon It is being tested in Itlay, Netherlands, Venezuela, UK, and thrown around as an idea in other places. I have listened to Chinese friends rant about it. It is scary as hell. They will limit your transportation methods based on your social credit score.
  - night-rider 4y ago
    So vote out those Eurocrats who implement this. Not hard to do. We do have a functioning democracy in the EU.
pacarvalho 4y ago
For those who have not heard this term before, here is the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System TL;DR A FICO score for trustability
karaterobot 4y ago
I think you're doing everything right. I assume that moving to confidentiality-friendly platforms to chat about sensitive topics also implies moving away from wide-area social media in general, and deleting your accounts — if not, that's a step you should take too. When you get off a platform to which you've contributed anything with personal opinions in it, you should obfuscate whatever you've written there before deleting it. Meaning, fill the text box with garbage, then delete it, then delete your account. There used to be a plugin that let you do this automatically on Reddit, I don't know if there still is, but it wouldn't be too hard to script either. Hypocritically on my part, HN does not support editing or deleting your old content. It's hard to avoid leaving any trace of yourself online; people want to talk to each other. I try to get around this by rotating user accounts, but I'm sure it's not enough. Really, none of it is really going to be enough when it actually happens, and we should just be ready for that. The only thing I can think of that would prevent a social credit system from being instituted is if people in power decided it was in their own best interest not to allow such a system. I suppose the ways to do that would either be to pay them more than other lobbyists, or to make it in their own best interest, i.e. let them know the danger it poses to us is also a danger to them. Given that, I wonder if, paradoxically, the whole cancel culture business is acting as a prophylactic against a social credit system, in that it makes legislators feel less invulnerable.
- woleium 4y ago
  I had always assumed that protection laws would be put in place by politicians before this became an issue. After all, it's the politicians who will suffer at the hands of everything-you-have-ever-done-on-the-internet reports beofore the rest of us. Maybe I was too naive.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    More likely, politicians will pass laws that will protect them, specifically, but not anyone else. Like how laws were passed to prevent protests in front of supreme court justices homes, but protesting in front of abortion doctors houses was found to be 'protected speech'.
fallingfrog 4y ago
If it happens, it will be enforced by private institutions, not public ones. Like your credit score. Your bank and your insurance company and businesses offering services and your employer will know what you’re saying and doing and they’ll offer special status to those who they deem low risk, and then everyone who doesn’t qualify will just not be eligible for services or will have to pay a much higher price. It’s a plausible but not inevitable future. But here in the west where everything is getting privatized anyway, it won’t be the government, it will be the quasi government of the insurance and financial sector and maybe also your employer that does it.
- fallingfrog 4y ago
  As a corollary, if you want to guess what kinds of speech they would target, it will be speech that in the aggregate costs them money: pro union speech, anti business speech especially about bad corporate behavior, speech urging actions against power structures, and to the extent that it causes a PR issue, certain kinds of hate speech, regarding groups that have enough people sympathetic to them to have it be a problem. Basically power only cares about speech that impacts power. That would be my guess.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I imagine a sufficiently advanced AI that could read every comment you've ever written on any anonymous (or nonymous) account and correlate any slipups that give away your identity or writing styles to create a total summation of everything you've ever produced online and then cast judgement on you. God may or may not have created us, but we seem to be in the process of creating him.
gdulli 4y ago
For the record the fear is overblown, but to indulge you, you're using the least safe site you could possibly be using. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook will let you delete your old content. HN doesn't unless you make a request and get a human involved. The feature may as well not exist if it isn't self serve.
trh0awayman 4y ago
Limiting the scope of your personal opinions might actually make you more of a red flag. Having no social media these days is considered a big fat one among the zoomer generation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ravenstine 4y ago
  > Having no social media these days is considered a big fat one among the zoomer generation. And their opinions matter?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
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night-rider 4y ago

These are the golden days, so relish them. The measures you take of not being so casual with what you share are basic information hygiene that everyone should be doing already. There’s already ‘social cooling’ happening, but hard to say if a China style credit system would hit the West soon. But if it does, there are plenty of tools to go dark and circumvent that. Check out Privacy Guides and pick a few tools you can use.

night-rider 4y ago
https://www.privacyguides.org/ https://www.privacyguides.org/
throwcancelling 4y ago
> China style credit system would hit the West soon It is being tested in Itlay, Netherlands, Venezuela, UK, and thrown around as an idea in other places. I have listened to Chinese friends rant about it. It is scary as hell. They will limit your transportation methods based on your social credit score.
- night-rider 4y ago
  So vote out those Eurocrats who implement this. Not hard to do. We do have a functioning democracy in the EU.

pacarvalho 4y ago

For those who have not heard this term before, here is the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System TL;DR A FICO score for trustability

karaterobot 4y ago

I think you're doing everything right. I assume that moving to confidentiality-friendly platforms to chat about sensitive topics also implies moving away from wide-area social media in general, and deleting your accounts — if not, that's a step you should take too. When you get off a platform to which you've contributed anything with personal opinions in it, you should obfuscate whatever you've written there before deleting it. Meaning, fill the text box with garbage, then delete it, then delete your account. There used to be a plugin that let you do this automatically on Reddit, I don't know if there still is, but it wouldn't be too hard to script either. Hypocritically on my part, HN does not support editing or deleting your old content. It's hard to avoid leaving any trace of yourself online; people want to talk to each other. I try to get around this by rotating user accounts, but I'm sure it's not enough. Really, none of it is really going to be enough when it actually happens, and we should just be ready for that. The only thing I can think of that would prevent a social credit system from being instituted is if people in power decided it was in their own best interest not to allow such a system. I suppose the ways to do that would either be to pay them more than other lobbyists, or to make it in their own best interest, i.e. let them know the danger it poses to us is also a danger to them. Given that, I wonder if, paradoxically, the whole cancel culture business is acting as a prophylactic against a social credit system, in that it makes legislators feel less invulnerable.

woleium 4y ago
I had always assumed that protection laws would be put in place by politicians before this became an issue. After all, it's the politicians who will suffer at the hands of everything-you-have-ever-done-on-the-internet reports beofore the rest of us. Maybe I was too naive.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  More likely, politicians will pass laws that will protect them, specifically, but not anyone else. Like how laws were passed to prevent protests in front of supreme court justices homes, but protesting in front of abortion doctors houses was found to be 'protected speech'.

fallingfrog 4y ago

If it happens, it will be enforced by private institutions, not public ones. Like your credit score. Your bank and your insurance company and businesses offering services and your employer will know what you’re saying and doing and they’ll offer special status to those who they deem low risk, and then everyone who doesn’t qualify will just not be eligible for services or will have to pay a much higher price. It’s a plausible but not inevitable future. But here in the west where everything is getting privatized anyway, it won’t be the government, it will be the quasi government of the insurance and financial sector and maybe also your employer that does it.

fallingfrog 4y ago
As a corollary, if you want to guess what kinds of speech they would target, it will be speech that in the aggregate costs them money: pro union speech, anti business speech especially about bad corporate behavior, speech urging actions against power structures, and to the extent that it causes a PR issue, certain kinds of hate speech, regarding groups that have enough people sympathetic to them to have it be a problem. Basically power only cares about speech that impacts power. That would be my guess.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I imagine a sufficiently advanced AI that could read every comment you've ever written on any anonymous (or nonymous) account and correlate any slipups that give away your identity or writing styles to create a total summation of everything you've ever produced online and then cast judgement on you. God may or may not have created us, but we seem to be in the process of creating him.

gdulli 4y ago

For the record the fear is overblown, but to indulge you, you're using the least safe site you could possibly be using. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook will let you delete your old content. HN doesn't unless you make a request and get a human involved. The feature may as well not exist if it isn't self serve.

trh0awayman 4y ago

Limiting the scope of your personal opinions might actually make you more of a red flag. Having no social media these days is considered a big fat one among the zoomer generation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ravenstine 4y ago
> Having no social media these days is considered a big fat one among the zoomer generation. And their opinions matter?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

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