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China Creates App To Tell You If You're Near Someone In Debt, Encourages You To Report Them (techspot.com)
The Chinese government has developed a mobile app that tells users if they are near someone who is in debt. The app, called a "map of deadbeat debtors," flashes when the user is within 500 meters of a debtor and displays that person's exact location. TechSpot reports: News of the app has caused quite a bit of controversy after it was originally reported by the state-run China Daily. It is an extension to China's existing "social credit" system which scores people based on how they act in public. The app is available through the WeChat platform which has become immensely popular in China. The government stated that "Deadbeat debtors in North China's Hebei province will find it more difficult to abscond as the Higher People's Court of Hebei on Monday introduced" the app. Once a user is alerted that they are close to a debtor, the user can then view their personal information. This will reveal their name, national ID number, and why they were added to the debtor list. The debtor can then be publicly shamed or reported to the authorities if it is deemed that they are capable of repaying their debts.
It would be very interesting to know what Chinese thought about this.
(We already know what we think about it. Outside the USA it is terrible, inside the USA with the privately run credit agencies it is just business as normal.)
But seriously, does anyone have any feedback upon what the Chinese themselves think about this sort of thing?
Dupe
Have gnu, will travel.
Where everyone can report anyone for anything.
That national ID number follows a person around.
Need a smart phone? Thats a national ID number linked service.
Add in any court issues, debts.
What kind of information a person posted online.
Get that score too low and the ability to domestic transport gets removed. No flying. No fast train service. No good hotels.
No good education options for anyone connected in anyway to the low score person. No government work.
Anyone can report a person. Its not just CCTV and a gov/mil/court database.
People report other people for all the expected reasons.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Apparently they invented it 2x this week alone.
I don't get it. Have an app tell a stranger to report some guy half a kilometer away? Why not have the app just report directly to whoever the stranger is supposed to report to?
The proximity has to be determined by a central server. Hence the app-operators already know where everyone in debt is. The police would just need to ask for the data. Hence I conclude this is for people that the police is _not_ interested in. The only rationale I can see is instilling a sense of being hunted by fellow citizens. You know, the general sense of everybody being out to denunciate everybody that the fascists and stalinists used so much to keep "order".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In other news, the Chinese government has developed a mobile app that tells users if they are near someone who has submitted a dupe. The app, called a "map of deadbeat duplicators," flashes when the user is within 500 meters of a duplicator and displays that person's exact location.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
In debt or behind/default on debt? I'd say that matters a lot.
In any case I still think it's a disgusting idea.
Because you want to shape the behavior of the populace to turn on each other over such things. It worked well before.
in Soviet? China, the phone turns you off
Or so we can dream.
Is that better or worse than turning you on?
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
If I was Chinese, I'd not only turn off smart phone, but get rid of it.This incessant cellphone tracking in China is insidious. I'm almost ready to ditch my smartphone as I only use the phone portion once or twice a year. Yes, IT IS POSSIBLE.
Will citizens be required to download this app?
Will the debtor's phone be continually pointing at him/her and squawking that he/she is a deadbeat? Will his/her family be shamed as well?
The term 'deadbeat' reminds me of a few (many) years back when 'deadbeat dads', who had failed to pay their child support, got their pictures in local newspapers. Similarly, some newspapers published pictures of 'johns' who patronized local prostitutes. Shaming was popular then. Musta been illegal, they don't do it now.
...omphaloskepsis often...
then when someone visits Washington DC when they get near a politician it will notify with a message that the US Government is 23 trillion dollars in debt, call the police immediately!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
That's the real reason for this -- to keep those not in power fighting each other, rather than looking upwards. It also happens in the west (just via different mechanisms).
I guess that why she didn't move around a lot
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
On first seeing this headline, my brain immediately jumped to recollecting "Majority Rule", episode 7 of season 1 of the Orville.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are a number of articles pointing out that the coverage of this stuff is full of holes. Here's the actual article:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a...
"Deadbeat debtors in North China's Hebei province will find it more difficult to abscond as the Higher People's Court of Hebei on Monday introduced a mini-program on WeChat targeting them. Called "a map of deadbeat debtors", the program allows users to find out whether there are any debtors within 500 meters."
First, this is a initiative by a local province, not "China". Second, it involves those who have defaulted on actual physical loans, and is completely unrelated to the "social credit" concept that the Chinese government is talking about. Additionally, many other things that are supposedly part of the social credit system, and reported as such in the West are actually privately designed and run things on Chinese social media sites run by Ali Baba and the like, and not actually ideas related to the social credit concept. (example: the thing where if you play a lot of MMOs you get rated lower on the dating apps: none of that has any connection to the Chinese government. The social media that collects the data and the dating app are both privately designed and run systems. It's like blaming the Feds for Facebook algorithms). Basically, 99% of the things that get reported as being part of the social credit concept aren't in fact part of anything run by the federal government in China. This is just a very poor l
While there are definitely questions to be answered, nobody is being well-informed about the issues if we keep getting bombarded with completely unconnected things and being told that they are "THE social credit system". The actual system proposal, from what I've read is was better translated as a "social trust system" in China since fraud is rampant and trust in local/federal government officials and private companies is rock bottom. The biggest penalties such as being blocked from luxury hotels and first-class flight were in fact proposed for company executives of companies that have breached the social credit system. The real story here, lost in the BS, is that China desperately wants to create a "trust culture" where people have faith in not only each other but government and companies. that basic trust is highly lacking, and that's really what this is all about. Doing business in China is much harder that it needs to be, because rampant fraud has led to a lack of trust. The *actual* social credit program seems more about creating a core of "trusted" entities, both public and private institutions.
Maybe the social credit ideas are completely misguided and the actual system will end up being abused and failing completely, but it really serves no purpose to get fed blatantly false headlines conflating unrelated things with the actual Chinese federal government's plans.
Note: I missed mentioning this part because of an edit: but the original 2014 white paper in China about creating the system noted 4 categories of entities it would apply to. (1) government agencies / local governments (2) private corporations (3) courts and judicial and (4) individuals. All of these types of entities are supposed to be rated by those who interact with them. This is important context that you ideally should have if you want to make your own mind up about what the intent here is all about.
This is horrifying. They want to create a social-pariah class and a surveillance society at the same time.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
As it says in the summary, the primary purpose of telling you is so that you can shame them when they walk by. And it also gives you some information about them and their debt, and you can report them if it appears they could pay it.
The goal is to cause people with debt to get in trouble for any conspicuous consumption they engage in.
Here's the source on that. Here's the "scare version" in the Western media:
https://www.gamesradar.com/min...
"Chinese gamers face direct ‘social penalties’, such as lack of access to Visa schemes and dating sites ... Buying games could potentially lower your ‘social credit’ in China by 2020 if a new government scheme gains traction. The Black Mirror style trial scheme discourages certain types of behaviour and can even penalise people for buying video games."
As much as I don't like the phrase, this text is absolutely "fake news" since there is no such plan for the Feds in China to monitor video game playing, or block people from dating sites:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
"Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility," Li Yingyun, Sesame's technology director told Caixin, a Chinese magazine, in February."
Note, these are ideas completely concocted by a private company Sesame, owned by Ali Baba fo their social-network score "Sesame Credit". If you score higher on Sesame Credit, then the company wants to do things like place you higher in search results on their platform-owned dating app. And you can score poorly for e.g. playing games ON the Sesame platform for 10 hours a day.
Note: this is completely different to the first article's claims that (1) buying games will (2) get you banned from dating apps due to (3) the Chinese government's social credit system. It's actually, if you (1) game too many hours per day on particular online platform you could be (2) down-rated on THEIR dating app due to (3) a scoring system unique to that company. It's nothing to do with the government, the social-credit system and doesn't in fact mention "banning" anyone from anything.
this is why the articles are junk, it takes very little research to prove them wrong. There are almost no sources you can trust to get the basic facts right here, no matter who you agree with.
Note: "Sesame Credit" is the source of many of the details on these "social credit" stories.
The thing is, a "Sesame Credit" score on their platform is in no respect more "Orwellian" than whatever secret tracking Facebook, Google and Twitter and all other social media regularly do. which is actually better?
1) To be *explicitly* track and rated, in a system with clearly-defined rules.
2) To be *secretly* tracked and rated, but we pretend it's not happening and won't tell you the rules
The goal is to cause people with debt to get in trouble for any conspicuous consumption they engage in.
No it isn't. The goal is to turn the population on each other. Didn't anyone read 1984?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I see no possible way this could turn ordinary broke people into murderhobos when confronted on a daily basis. What could possibly go wrong?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How does this work, surely not ALL debt triggers this?
Sorry I don't have a reference, but I think I saw an article about the problem of trust in different European economies, for example Italy versus Britain, where Italy suffers because of a general lack of trust which slows down business.
Shame them how? It's now legal in China to verbally and/or physically abuse someone the app says is a debtor?
Wow. Its Black Mirror happening right now...
It was always legal in China to shame people you catch violating social norms, WTF are you going on about?
"Verbal abuse" would be if they know they were declared shameful by the bank, but they deny it when you wag your finger at them.
Like 3 people in China read that book.
The fact that your "understanding" simply substitutes a western political trope shows the depth of you "understanding."
You should really look into the Chinese culture of societal unity if you think that is going to be the result. It isn't even on the table.
Like 3 people in China read that book.
The fact that your "understanding" simply substitutes a western political trope shows the depth of you "understanding."
You should really look into the Chinese culture of societal unity if you think that is going to be the result. It isn't even on the table.
The number of people in China who have read that book is irrelevant to the goals of the state. Likewise, the "Chinese culture of societal unity" is irrelevant if individuals are persecuted for disagreeing.
Claiming that everyone agrees $FOO is a good idea is stupid when anyone who disagrees is punished. You can't use their lack of objections as evidence of their support when said objections would get them executed.
Also, what's the difference between the chinese "culture of societal unity" (which is based on race) and the white supremicists (which is also based on race)? They both want their society cleansed of outsiders who are not of their race. I don't understand why you would think this is a good thing.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
If other westerners weren't already using the book as reference point, referring to it would have no value.
And the details of the story examine the problems with governance in the western world; it isn't a history book that you can take some sort of deeper lesson out of. It is fiction, that is only useful for understanding real events in a very narrow, context-dependent way.
Using it for China is totally worthless; it wouldn't be a realistic story if it was set in China. Nobody would use it as an example, because it would be obviously absurd. Chinese culture doesn't have the same concepts of individualism.
And the details of the story examine the problems with governance in the western world;
I see you haven't read the book. It isn't about governance, in much the same way that Romeo and Juliet wasn't about poison.
The book was about showing the end result when citizens self-censor to avoid persecution. In this regard, it is spot on relevant to China today.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It's incorrect and naive to argue that these "privately developed" features of social credit are not government directed in China. They are. China has a different economic system and different governmental system than you're used to thinking about.
Go back a few decades and everything in China was explicitly owned by the government. Today, about 75% of companies and assets in China are owned by the government (US governments own less than 10% of total assets in the US). Any company acting against what the Chinese government sees as the public good will not be allowed to do business in China. This is a different culture. No CEO in China has a desire to have their company act independently of the government. That would be bad for business and a critical personality flaw in a Chinese CEO. Anywhere the government doesn't have explicit ownership, it still has effective control.
Also, China is not run by the "federated" idea of independent local governments we're used to. Your use of the phrase "Chinese federal government" would be very controversial in China. In the US, we're used to city, county, state, and federal governments all being elected and managed independently. There is one government in China: the Central government. If the Governor of Hebei province makes a decision the central government doesn't like, the central government can remove that official and reverse the decision. Officially, the Governor of Hebei is second in command of the province, reporting to the appointed Party Secretary for Hebei.
i just don't know any more, and i am apparently too old to care.