Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters and Student Privacy Matters, gathered the following links to an important story: China has developed a credit score game that rates its citizens by their behavior.
She writes:
“Check out this video and news articles about Sesame Credit, the big data social credit score and game being used in China to encourage obedience to the government — to be mandatory for all citizens by 2020. Very scary stuff!”
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-terrifying-look-at-future.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Okay, here’s a question, I understand that the Chinese government is often seen as the big brother bogey man, but why is their collection of big data any scarier that the exact same data being collected by Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. etc.? I think it’s the reflexive reaction, particularly strong in American culture, to automatically mistrust government while ignoring the exact same actions by mega corporations. But let’s step back, gov’t is (ostensibly) about the people, corps are simply in it for the money, and they make no bones about that. This mistrust of all things government related, especially here in the west where we ELECT EPOPLE to represent us has led us to this ridiculous and surreal moment in history. We’re way too far down the road of “Big Data” to worry too much about what’s being collected, that horse has left the barn folks. All one can do is monitor what he/she puts into the ether.
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Iain,
Nothing in the post implies that we should not worry about corporations. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have often criticized private corporations and big foundations like Gates for funding intrusions into privacy. The horse has not left the barn. We have to fight every day to prevent data mining and invasions of our privacy. The first step is to be informed.
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American companies are very well connected in China, as it is a haven of cheap manufacturing with unprotected labor (and air quality). My worry is that what havoc is wreaked on the lives of people in China will be imported back here to the U.S. in the not too distant future. Education corporatists, “reformers”, love to talk about China with great awe. Remember tiger moms? Duncan and Rhee were on board and then some.
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“My worry is that what havoc is wreaked on the lives of people in China will be imported back here to the U.S. in the not too distant future.”
Back to the Future-Cuyahoga Revisited.
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Many Chinese know exactly how to behave/act in public for their government, but once away from that government’s prying eyes, they often do the exact opposite. It has to do with Taoism and growing up learning how to not resist by being naturally passive aggressive. Why struggle to swim upstream when you can just be a rock in the middle of the stream that lets the water flow around you.
There’s an old saying in China that goes back milliniea that I’m probably going to mangle.
Something like this:
Its a long distance between us and our leaders safe behind their walls in a distance capital and what they don’t know about what we are doing doesn’t hurt us.
Most Chinese also realize that if the state owned media reports news on a hot-button issue, the opposite is probably true; that’s sort of similar to what the corporate media reports in the U.S., often the opposite of truth by what they leave out.
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It’s going to take a new set of skills to defeat this invasion of online interactions. I suppose people can build a profile of all activities that are acceptable and only engage in those electronically. Of course, if your score is too perfect that could be used as a flag as well. This Chinese iteration of invasion of private space should just make us more vigilant against the attempts of our homegrown big brother organizations who want to rate, rank and analyze everything they can.
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I suspect that the Chinese are learning from U.S. corporations how to invade the space of its citizens: Facebook, Twitter, corporate data brokers and online tracking, etc.
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There was a media campaign a few years ago to revive Confusianism, which encourages compliance.
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Confucianism and Taoism both have a mixed influence on most Chinese. Taoism tends to have a larger influence on most of the Chinese and Confucianism more on those who rise in the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Ah, yes.
The Extra Credits Youtube channel — which is officially about video games but often delves into other topics — had a segment about this a few years ago.
Here it is:
Pretty informative video about this creepy thing.
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LOL that’s what I get for commenting before checking out the links! This is the video linked in Curmuducation.
The channel has great videos in general. I would encourage any History teachers in particular to check out their sister channel, Extra History. There are several well done videos there that could be well applied in the classroom.
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I hope this doesn’t give Trump and Pence ideas. The Religious Right in particular would love this.
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