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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel (technologyreview.com)
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review: Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step." The Journal claims that the system will at first log "infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules" but will be expanded in the future -- potentially even to Internet activity. Some aspects of the system are already in testing, but there are some challenges to implementing such a far-reaching apparatus. It's difficult to centralize all that data, check it for accuracy, and process it, for example -- let alone feed it back into the system to control everyday life. And China has data from 1.4 billion people to handle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... and violating family-planning rules
So, in effect, you're f*cked twice.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
We are getting there. Thanks for the warning, George. Too bad nobody listened.
Coming soon to a country near you.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This is nothing but big government doing what it does best - helping its people. Instead of allowing the people to make their own decisions, it is making the correct decisions for them. And why not? The smartest people run the Chinese government. You can't be any geek off the street and join the Communist Party. You have to be smart and capable, and only the cream rises to the top. Why shouldn't these people be able to run society? I see people on Slashdot all the time bemoaning how stupid people ruin everything. See: Donald Trump voters. Things would be SO much better if we smart people just had to power to change things.
Isn't eliminating negative outcomes and ensuring positive outcomes one of the major arguments in favor of big government? This is what China is doing. Oh, it eliminates personal freedom? The personal freedom that Chinese people never had at any point in history? You mean "freedumb". Because people who bitch and moan about freedom all the time are precisely the ones who make such consistently wrong decisions. Why shouldn't the government step in and help them? Isn't that why we established governments in the first place?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In a US where there is a broadly sweeping and growing generational consensus that government should: ...you're fooling yourself.
- provide all healthcare
- protect everyone from any conceivable harm whether practical, realistic or not (from terrorists to pedophiles), - even from their OWN CHOICES - and at literally any expense
"Any government powerful enough to give the people all that they want is also powerful enough to take from the people all that they have."
Famously NOT said by T.Jefferson, but pretty damned good comment nonetheless.
-Styopa
New to /. maybe, but this was revealed over a year ago. Extra Credits did a pretty good video covering the dystopian system from a game developer point of view.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
In fact, there have been more gun control laws passed these past three years than in the entire history of the nation combined. Are we safer? Definitely not.
Oh please, this is just plain dumb. Obviously, you must be extremely young, because guns are easier to get and much more ubiquitous than they have been in a long time, and the laws are much more relaxed. Go back to the 70s: legal concealed carry didn't exist back then, and states that are now open-carry were not. It's easier and cheaper than ever to get an AR-15 rifle and all the accessories you could possibly want for it. Now they're even trying to legalize suppressors. The variety of guns you can get now is overwhelming too; back then it was mainly just crappy revolvers; now there's an endless array of guns of all types, many specifically designed for concealed-carry.
I'm a Chinese immigrant and read Chinese news everyday. No where did I find this story mentioned, neither from main land news sites nor overseas ones. Maybe it's a secretive thing, I don't know. But I tend to think it's a money grab kind of project like many others that's not really practical or intended to be. You seem like a person with an open mind, so I'll say this. Take everything you read about China from the western media (including this site) with a grain of salt. It's very very biased. Think about how the media acted during the election. It's on that level and beyond. I'll probably be labelled a "50-cent" in no time, but anyways.