Bloomberg News reports on China’s obliteration of privacy:
China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
The capital city will pool data from several departments to reward and punish some 22 million citizens based on their actions and reputations by the end of 2020, according to a plan posted on the Beijing municipal government’s website on Monday. Those with better so-called social credit will get “green channel” benefits while those who violate laws will find life more difficult.
The Beijing project will improve blacklist systems so that those deemed untrustworthy will be “unable to move even a single step,” according to the government’s plan. Xinhua reported on the proposal Tuesday, while the report posted on the municipal government’s website is dated July 18.
China has long experimented with systems that grade its citizens, rewarding good behavior with streamlined services while punishing bad actions with restrictions and penalties. Critics say such moves are fraught with risks and could lead to systems that reduce humans to little more than a report card.
Beijing’s efforts represent the most ambitious yet among more than a dozen cities that are moving ahead with similar programs.
Hangzhou rolled out its personal credit system earlier this year, rewarding “pro-social behaviors” such as volunteer work and blood donations while punishing those who violate traffic laws and charge under-the-table fees. By the end of May, people with bad credit in China have been blocked from booking more than 11 million flights and 4 million high-speed train trips, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
According to the Beijing government’s plan, different agencies will link databases to get a more detailed picture of every resident’s interactions across a swathe of services. The proposal calls for agencies including tourism bodies, business regulators and transit authorities to work together.
The tracking of individual behavior in China has become easier as economic life moves online, with apps such as Tencent’s WeChat and Ant Financial’s Alipay a central node for making payments, getting loans and organizing transport. Accounts are generally linked to mobile phone numbers, which in turn require government IDs.
The final version of China’s national social credit system remains uncertain. But as rules forcing social networks and internet providers to remove anonymity get increasingly enforced and facial recognition systems become more popular with policing bodies, authorities are likely to find everyone from internet dissenters to train-fare skippers easier to catch — and punish — than ever before.
I wonder what rating a certain person would get for being a Twitter bully with name calling and self promotion.
The Chinese Communist Party has had a system in place for decades to determine if applicants who want to join the party are reliable enough to support the Party and its agendas.
In other words, the in-depth investigation digs into the actions and behavior of several generations of the applicant’s family and friends and the results must reveal the applicant will be totally “loyal” to the consensus of The Standing Committee (about 150 members) of the National people’s Congress and the Politburo Standing Committee of 5 to 11 members (currently 7). Leadership in China is from the top down starting with the Politburo and Xi Jinping, China’s president, is the General Secretary of that small group.
To climb the hierarchy of the Party, one must repeatedly prove they are capable of handling the job and are totally committed to continue the current agenda of the party as defined by each 5-year plan.
The Chinese Communist Party is the largest political party in the world with more than 80-million members or 0.05 percent of the total population. When a Party member is found guilty of a crime like treason and/or corruption, they end up in one specific overcrowded prison and they are not the only one that suffers. Their entire family and probably any close friends are also branded untrustworthy and are closely watched by state security.
Remember when we could read something like this and think, “Well, fortunately that could never happen here”
Imagine what our own Religious Right could do with political power and a system like that.
The extremist religious right in the US is working hard to build the mind control machine that China already has and China is working to make what they already have more efficient.
They can’t stop salivating at the thought of it.
Why just the religious right? What do you think Mark Suckerberg would do with a system like that? Bill Gates? Edurephormers (and the investors who fund them) of all stripes are salivating at the very idea. Minding, aggregating and profiting from our data from cradle to grave is a fully bi-partisan adventure.
Education reform is the least of the concerns of such control – yet the most important one to preserve.
Papers today all citing demographers and census bureau how to talk about the “whites will be minority in 2042.” Poverty and “welfare.” Guns and crime. Prison privatization. Asylum seekers and dreamers.
Rich white guys in control of the government, courts, and data…
Which is why public education and a free press are the most important entities to protect now more than ever.
Have they burned all the books yet?
Or did they just fire the librarians, close the libraries, and force all the brick and mortar bookstores out of business?
Once all the books printed on paper are gone, it will be easier to delete e-books they do not approve of, and they will promote it as environmentally friendly censorship.
Precisely. And all too familiar. Who needs a “Tiger Mom” when you can have a tiger Big Brother?
Ironic, by the way, that the web is produced by servers that emit CO2 by the kiloton, whereas paper literally grows on trees. The whole “go paperless” to help the environment thing is a cooked up farce to get people to use e-books, data collecting payment websites, and so on. It’s like telling people to buy cars to save the world from horse methane emissions – not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
The worst part about this, though, is neither the very real damage to the environment nor the very real worldwide disappearance of any rights related to the 1st and 4th Amendments, but the fact that governments both authoritarian and corporatist-oligarchic are attempting to use the web to control people instead of allowing people to use the web to control their governments. Not small potatoes, this.
Thanks for that note, LCT, I’d been clueless. A Guardian article saysthat in 2015, data centres were already responsible for 2% of global greenhouse emissions, on par w/aviation. But I would have thought ppr-pulping at its peak was just as bad (not to mention tree-replacement math), no?
Lloyd, I too worry about digital knowledge being deletable. On a related note, I recently read that Incas had oral-only culture [except for the knotted strings they used to track/ tax material possessions]. Historians suggest that left them particularly vulnerable to conquistadores , as they couldn’t secretly pass notes/ books among resisters, or retain/ pass on cultural tradition to potential future resisters.
Incas lack of a written language wasn’t the only reason they lost to Spain. Disease swept through their population like it did all the native tribes in the Americas soon after contact and I’ve read that up to 90-percent of the Inca population perished. What army the Inca’s had left wasn’t enough to stop the Spanish.
Versions of social credit systems are already in play. Large corporations are offering perks to employees who participate in “wellness programs” with data obtained from records generated by equipment in fitness rooms and worn on the body (e.g., watches with multiple functions) in addition to prescriptions you take and medical records that you may provide (knowingly or not).
Your value as a customer is being monetized, with these metrics functioning much like the social credit score in China, but not “state” sponsored as it is there.
For example, ratings have long been used to establish your credit-worthiness…the FICO score. New rating schemes assign other values to you as a customer. The data is generated by you and by others in multiple contexts. This information is used to offer you perks, or exclude you from these, or to set up tiers of “customer service” based on how much you are worth, invest, spend and what for in which venues. See for example the marketing at
https://www.selligent.com/platform/capabilities/behavioral-retargeting
And children are being monetized. Some produce a higher return on investment than others. The Heckman Equation will estimate the probable returns of investments in pre-school programs and related “social impact” financial products. The secret to ROI (Return on Investment) is cherry picking the participants, excluding the most costly students. This same strategy is being used by some charter school operators as well.
Specific financial products (Social Impact Bonds or SIB’s and Pay for Success Contracts) are being marketed as if a better option to address social problems than any gov’ment run program. See for example this marketing from a Nobel Laureate economist: https://heckmanequation.org.
Or look at the metrics for calculating the investment value of other social programs in NYC as calculated by Robinhood.org. Robinhood has over 150 monetary calculations for the social costs of specific behaviors and outcomes of programs. One of the measures is dubbed QUALY. It refers to “quality of life years,” a variant of a measure used in medical practice and insurance.
Robinhood has also calculated the economic value of a high-quality preschool program as those monetary benefits accumulate beyond high school. That monetary value (2014) was calculated at $50,650 per child. Imagine if that dollar amount was actually available for full-spectrum support of children at an early age. https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
Here is a press release for a new social impact program in education from fans of STEM and pre-vocational and vocational education. The slogan for marketing these ventures is “doing good (for others) while doing well (making a profit.” http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/lumina-robin-hood-salesforce-impact-launch-impact-investing-alliance
In China, about 300 pay-your-bill stations require you to smile at a screen if you want to complete the transaction. The facial recognition system operates with “an artificial intelligence” trained on a gazillion smiling faces. These will allow your payment or not, depending on other data in your wallet of social credits. I was reminded of our dear leader’s chronic demands for people to like what he does and believe what he says and if in his presence to have the right look.
I am also reminded of all the data dashboards in schools and some of the software where cute avatars for each student rise or fall along various columns representing compliance with class rules and other indicators of good behavior. And that made me think of the technologies in use and under development to control behavior, some of these for children–headsets and wristbands with signals to keep you “focussed” and on task. For more see https://seattleducation.com/2018/06/17/heckman-and-pritzker-pitch-apps-as-poverty-solutions-yielding-a-13-return-on-investment/
You’re right, Laura. A bunch of SLOGANS is running our schools and it is all about competition … like football. Those yahoos really do think schools are stadiums. Crazy.
And …
It’s called developing, “grit.” Gag me.
Gadfly on the Wall has a great piece on “grit.” Diane posted it. Here it is again.
https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/category/grit/
I am in Texas visiting with my daughter and her family. Dow Chemical is a huge local employer. Using technology, they know if an employee gets arrested, and the company will fire the person without due process. They will also require obese employees to join a gym under contract to Dow. Technology is the new serveillance normal.
“Robbin The Hood”
Robbin the hood
Of public schools
Ridin a flood
Of charter tools
Over the hedge
With his Merry Men
Robbin The Hood
Has struck again
It’s not just large corporations that have these stupid “wellness programs,” either.
My own school district forces us to take part. They take money from our paychecks every month to do this “wellness program,” and if we don’t participate, we lose that money. I refuse to participate (I don’t want the district knowing all of these things), so I lose about $100 a year because of that.
Not a lot, I know, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Am familiar w/ the social impact school bonds, where if, e.g., preK investment doesn’t reduce SpEd placement in early primary grades, school has to pay extra back to bond-holder. But this seems murkier– how do investors get returns? I read the blurbs at the links, but still don’t get it.
Look over there (in China). It’s a squirrel! (surveillance state)
America is already ahead of China in both the surveillance and credit rating realms.
It’s just that the systems are less obvious than China’s openly publicized rating system.
For example, credit already essentially equals social credit in the US and despite the fact that virtually all online and phone traffic is monitored and saved for future use by whomever has access and for whatever purpose, there is official denial (from Google, Fakebook and the government) that that is the case
And our friend John Arnold is leading that charge. He’s even fooled many cancer patients and doctors into believing that he’s trying to lower drug prices for them. I liked it better when Trojan Horses were visible.
Correct.
In the U.S. the corporate and private sector is the surveillance state that collects data on every citizen and turns that data into a profit. That data collecting has turned into a blizzard of harassment that arrives every day in the form of SPAM (that I delete without opening), crap mail (most of the crap mail that arrives in my mail box goes right in the recycle been without reading) and robo-phone calls (that I refuse to listen to) with one goal: to pry money out of 99.9 percent of the population so a member of the 0.1 percent profits and increases their fortune.
To ignore and delete/get rid of what I think of as the manipulate-control-and-profit from debris sent out by our corporate surveillance state takes time out of our lives every day.
Curse that corporate surveillance state for every person that dies when health care is denied because that data indicates a health condition was a pre-existing one.
Curse that corporate surveillance state for preying on people by offering miracle cures that cure nothing but end up profiting a Trump like fraud.
Curse that corporate surveillance state for identifying our political passions and causes and then attempting to get us to donate money to their fake organizations that do nothing to deal with the causes we identify with as another Trump lie fraud profits off of us. If I donated a dollar to every e-mail and snail mail and phone call that arrives each month asking me to donate to a cause or candidate that I support, I’d be bankrupt, homeless, wearing rags, and starving.
Curse that corporate surveillance state for feeding profitable information to Russia so they’d know who to target in key battle ground states and what to say to those people to get them not to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Curse that corporate surveillance state for Democratic and Independent voters in a few totally controlled GOP states that lost their ability to vote in 2016 and 2018.
Amen
How does credit equal social credit? I tend toward your earlier post, social-credit-monitoring in a surveillance state doesn’t compute here. All our society is likely to use it for is pushing people to buy in general, & buy on credit specifically. Pretty easy to opt out of: buy only necessities, in cash. Anecdotally, judging from my sons & their millennial friends– most of whom have little job security & need multiple gigs to make ends meet– that is what they are doing.
There was a story on NPR about a guy who had a C-pap machine that told the insurance company if he was wearing it or not. If not, they would not pay.
I related this story to a group, and they all sided with the insurance company and the idea of machine regulation of regulation.
I turned off the built-in modem the day I payed off my CPAP machine. Now I buy my supplies online for a fraction of what it cost me through my insurance.
My doctor is frustrated that she no longer gets the data from the machine directly, but I collect it myself and give it to her when I have appointments.
I am not going to shrug my shoulders and let my life be narrowed by electronic data collection, inasmuch as I can do something about it.
Kudos.
An Asian 1984 in 2018
Everyone should correct various pieces of their profile, wait a few days, correct a different item, until name, picture, gender, hobbies, phone, address bear no resemblance to reality. Unfriend all contacts as first step.
The race to collect and integrate the data has been in the works for a long time. That’s the billionaires hard at work. Student data, city data, same software, app companies, corporations and their so-called philanthropic counterparts. What to do? Screens/ed tech/tests/surveys/gig economy/etc. In some cities participation in public process is quite close to requiring an online reservation.
https://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/bold-ideas/