Banned From What’s App!

Have you heard about the Chinese 
“Social Credit System”?

The Race is On to 5G and The Internet of Things.

[A new form of Behavior Modification]

Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a 
Chinese-style social credit system
In China, scoring citizens’ behavior is official government policy. U.S. companies are increasingly doing something similar, outside the law. fastcompany

Have you heard about China’s social credit system? It’s a technology-enabled, surveillance-based nationwide program designed to nudge citizens toward better behavior. The ultimate goal is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step,” according to the Chinese government.

In place since 2014, the social credit system is a work in progress that could evolve by next year into a single, nationwide point system for all Chinese citizens, akin to a financial credit score. It aims to punish for transgressions that can include membership in or support for the Falun Gong or Tibetan Buddhism, failure to pay debts, excessive video gaming, criticizing the government, late payments, failing to sweep the sidewalk in front of your store or house, smoking or playing loud music on trains, jaywalking, and other actions deemed illegal or unacceptable by the Chinese Government.

China’s social credit system has been characterized in one pithy tweet as “authoritarianism, gamified.” [“on steroids”]

Here are some of the elements of America’s growing social credit system.

The New York State Department of Financial Services announced earlier this year that life insurance companies can base premiums on what they find in your social media posts

PatronScan helps spot fake IDs—and troublemakers. When customers arrive at a PatronScan-using bar, their ID is scanned. The company maintains a list of objectionable customers designed to protect venues from people previously removed for “fighting, sexual assault, drugs, theft, and other bad behavior,” according to its website. A “public” list is shared among all PatronScan customers. So someone who’s banned by one bar in the U.S. is potentially banned by all the bars in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada that use the PatronScan system for up to a year. (PatronScan Australia keeps a separate System.

Airbnb—a major provider of travel accommodation and tourist activities—bragged in March that it now has more than 6 million listings in its system. That’s why a ban from Airbnb can limit travel options. Airbnb can disable your account for life for any reason it chooses, and it reserves the right to not tell you the reason

You can be banned from […] WhatsApp if too many other users block you. You can also get banned for sending spam, threatening messages, trying to hack or reverse-engineer the WhatsApp app, or using the service with an unauthorized app. WhatsApp is small potatoes in the United States. But in much of the world, it’s the main form of electronic communication. Not being allowed to use WhatsApp in some countries is as punishing as not being allowed to use the telephone system in America.

If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy. In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.


NOW THIS:

China Finally Snuffs Out a Beacon of Liberal Thought and Democracy
Beijing’s Unirule Institute, founded to promote economic liberalization and democracy, set to shut down after a quarter-century, citing government pressure (WSJ)

Unirule Institute of Economics founded to promote economic and political liberalisation. One of China’s only independent thinktanks has been ordered to shut down, another sign of the dramatically shrinking space for public debate under the government of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

The Unirule Institute of Economics, one of China’s few remaining outposts of liberal thought, said in a statement on Monday that local authorities had declared the thinktank “unregistered and unauthorised.” Chinese liberal thinktank forced to close after being declared illegal

“China is making a transition from arbitrary rule of law to rile of law, and we’re an example of that,” Jiang Hao, a public policy researcher for the organisation, told the New York Times last year. In its statement on Monday, Unirule said the ban on their organisation was a “serious violation” of China’s own laws, including the constitution, which maintains citizens’ rights of freedom of speech, publishing and association.

AND THIS:

China’s Potential New Trade Weapon: Corporate Social Credits
Program will reward or punish companies for their behavior, but foreigners worry Beijing will use it to impose political orthodoxy on international firms (WSJ)