Slashdot Mirror
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.
Apparently they invented it 2x this week alone.
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.
Because you want to shape the behavior of the populace to turn on each other over such things. It worked well before.
Or so we can dream.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Nah, it's because Chinese personal bankruptcy laws are pathetically weak. There are people who either rack up debt they can't pay, or just don't pay debts when they're capable of it. If an individual debt is below a certain level, it's very hard to sue the debtor, and with the weak bankruptcy laws you can't get their assets liquidated and/or restrict them from running a business. Fixing or improving the laws for better protection against deadbeat debtors would be hard, because the Chinese government isn't a coherent unit, it's a massive bureaucracy that barely functions. Making this app to try and shame people into servicing their debts and/or get people to avoid doing business with them is far easier.
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.