Author Topic: China making a scoring system for citizens  (Read 1664 times)

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Offline Askold

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China making a scoring system for citizens
« on: October 07, 2015, 02:51:58 am »
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/chinas-nightmarish-citizen-scores-are-warning-americans

Quote

    Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
    The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
    In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
    It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create.
    Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
    Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.
    Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
    Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

TL;DR: It's a game. You lose points by doing stuff the government does not like or by having friends who do such things. If you can raise your score high enough you get to have privileges that other citizens don't have.

This does give me a great idea for a scifi setting with a dystopian hellhole but seeing it get popular in real world is kinda scary. The fact that some people LIKE the system because they can brag about their high score is a disappointingly very much what I expect from people...
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline Sylvana

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Re: China making a scoring system for citizens
« Reply #1 on: October 07, 2015, 06:48:45 am »
I will be honest, this is simply ingenious in its brilliance and its evilness.

If you are any kind of government a system like this would be the best thing in the world. It would allow you to monitor your people and be able to identify possible troublemakers, but more than that it will allow the people to sort out the dissidents for you. Because of how people's brains work, society in general will act as a kind of social police force, with people reporting on each other and shunning those who are dissidents.

Not to mention that the power available for personal abuse is staggering. If the government does not like someone all it takes is a little tweak of a score and the system will take care of itself. Having access to a system like this you could topple political or corporate rivals almost instantly.

It truly is an ingeniously insidious system. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if something similar started appearing in all developed countries. With the cancer like spread of smart phones and social media and people being connected at all times and sharing their private data constantly, I could see a system like this being easily instituted and with the right marketing would even be welcomed by the population in general.

Offline Askold

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Re: China making a scoring system for citizens
« Reply #2 on: October 07, 2015, 07:28:20 am »
I know! This thing is genius and I am equally impressed and disgusted. It's all digital so keeping eye on it is really easy and people will avoid undesirables AND do things that the government wants simply because they will try to grind some points to get privileges.
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline Ultimate Paragon

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Re: China making a scoring system for citizens
« Reply #3 on: October 07, 2015, 02:30:25 pm »
Mao would be proud.  And that's not a compliment.

Offline SpaceProg

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Re: China making a scoring system for citizens
« Reply #4 on: October 07, 2015, 07:09:28 pm »
China plz wtf? >_<