A Student Was Rejected By A College Because Of China's 'Social Credit System' (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: A prestigious college in Beijing that reportedly tried to bar a student because his father was on a government blacklist is causing huge controversy in China. According to state media reports, a high school student with the surname Rao in the eastern city of Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province, was accepted on the back of his score in China's fiendishly difficult and incredibly competitive national college entrance exam. But before his family could enjoy Rao's accomplishments, the college notified them he may not be able to attend because of his father's poor credit standing -- the father owed 200,000 RMB (about $30,000) to a local bank, and had been put on a blacklist dubbed the "lost trust list" for individuals with bad social standing, state media reported.

Blacklists are a key feature of China's controversial "social credit system" -- a set of government programs that sets up both incentives and disincentives to encourage people to behave in socially desirable ways. Social credit in today's China involves government programs that collect and analyze data from different parts of people's lives, including their education history, compliance with traffic rules, criminal history and debt. It has raised serious concerns over individual privacy rights.

Comments

Re:Like Mccarhty?

[NFN_NLN]

Just read "I married a communist", a novel about the Mccrathy era. There was a part there where someone was unable to get a scholarship because a friend of his was in a blacklist. Yes, I know that technically one can have the money to study without the scholarship, but I bet that someone rich enough to do that would also have enough money to somehow fix his social credit.

Yes, but this is unrealistic in general. It's not like there is a centralized list where everyone's friends and relationships are documented. And even if there was the government agency required to staff it would be ridiculous. You would literally have to trick a moronic populous into entering their own information into a database of sorts. -MZ

Re:What Individual Privacy Rights?

[mwvdlee]

The fun thing about microaggresions is that you can do about a million of them before they start counting as aggression.