Interesting article. On the one hand, it provides insides into how the project actually worked in china, which I didn't know. That's interesting.
But it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.
You're right that the private vs. public is a very important distinction here.
On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.
If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.
While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).
The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.
Your "in theory" is doing a lot of work there. So much work. Have you heard about no-fly lists? The latest ICE actions? The Red Scare? Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
> Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.
Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
> The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private.
No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.
We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.
> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.
Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.
> parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service
Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.
The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.
As others have noted, the bad thing about social credit is that any one particular institution does it - its that the social credit is mandated by unaccountable entities with lopsided amounts of power. It doesn't matter if its a government that's doing it, or a company, or a cabal of companies, or even if it was literally a single person - the undue coercion is the problem.
The relevant freedom is the freedom to opt-out.
It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.
As an exercise, can you construct a version of private social credit that supports opt-out and isn't dystopian? I posit that any such system would interpret and opt-out as an effective negative score, heavily disincentivizing that option, and making it de-facto mandatory.
That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough. Similarly, if all the banks dropped you because your shared social credit said "don't do business with this person".
> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.
> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.
>That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough.
Luckily neither google nor apple does any hardcore KYC (yet) so such bans can be avoided with a new phone + phone number. Inconvenient? Yes. Being perma-locked out of digital services for the rest of your life? Hardly.
>But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar.
I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.
Why is that strange?
You are making my point though. You'd have a problem if you'd have to fake your religion or your sexual orientation so you get served, but it's fine if we do it with how "likable" we are.
How am I making your point?
That most people cannot even understand where the problem is.
Downvotes make my point as well. I do not want to say the right thing so people aren't offended so I am granted access (or updoots). I'd rather deal with robots for this reason. Spending my money somewhere should be enough to serve me, like me or not. I think it's crazy that I even have to explain it...
The government staying out of it makes it worse. The companies have so much power over your life without any oversight.
On the other hand, the government staying out of it makes it better, because if you're banned by the main taxi firm or housing market or [insert rhetorical third thing], there remains the chance of using some sketchy unpopular alternative service, and you're not in violation of the law if you find such a option.
I’m reminded of the punishment that Kevin Mitnick received, which included a ban on using any computing device more advanced than a landline phone. I understand that he was agreed to this, but one cannot agree to sell themselves into slavery[0], and yet these supervised release conditions are considered legal and acceptable to most folks not subject to them. Plea deals are a pox on society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Arrest,_convicti...
> Mitnick was released from prison on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release period, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement
The sketchiness of those alternative services frequently means you are in violation of the law by using them. IP law on its own for film and tv is a series of monopolies granted to pieces of content and if the owner doesn’t want to sell it to you, Pirate Bay is not a legal alternative.
Regardless these arguments about whether it’s bad based on if the government is involved or not is ridiculous given how interwoven our corporations and government are. Like just doing business with any company strips your 4th amendment rights on that data.
There’s no sane way to argue that they have a clear delineation throughout society
The clear delineation is the police and prisons, and courts. If the government is a corporation that happens to control the police, despite having that power it still isn't supposed to have everything all sewn up, because laws and courts and institutional resistance prevent it from doing anything it likes. This system is theoretical and supported mostly by wishing, but used to work for quite a long time. Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
> Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
You should visit some megacorp campuses and then rethink this view. If you actually believe it then I dare you to do something against their rules while in one of their offices and be marveled at how many people pour out of the literal walls dressed in clothing colored based on their specific job, and then tell us about how they lack police forces
They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of. In my naivety I don't believe megacorps carry out extrajudicial punishments, apart from banning people. They have to go through the law, and try to get people punished, not carry it out themselves.
Im not sure I was clear
>They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of.
This is not true, they have their own private security forces, with guns, who will seize you on their property. Managing to run away from an organization's controlled territory to be safe from them, applies to public 0governments too
> The government staying out of it makes it worse.
That's because all that power turns the companies into paragovernamental organizations. Anything with the power to gatekeep human rights is a government.
> private <-> private
the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC
there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons
This was similar to my take. What's dystopian about how the Chinese system was/is/was rumored to be was that it was the government doing the tracking and scoring.
Which ends up harsher than what private entities do as a form of moralistic restrictions than are dubiously related to one's ability to pay back loans. I don't see how barring one from using long distance travel is going to help them better pay back loans beyond punitive punishment.
at this point, "doing that" is called having a "CRM" system.
it's all part of how there's widely available social media technology and academic graph languages.
of course the government is going to track the citizens, it's all a matter of how, how much, and to what end.
The wave of CRM is CDP. Customer Data Platform. The key is that it isn't just your basic account data, but all the behavioral data across various system interactions both online and off (if applicable). Shopping Cart abandonment email campaigns are pretty benign. But the outrage around the targeted ad for baby/pregnancy products that made the news from Target a few years ago is just the start for what more insightful data signals can give you. I don't really care about most retailers knowing what I buy. I do care about them reselling that data to big aggregators that know everything I buy, where I go and when, and join that what sites I visit and what mail I get. It is too much and can be abused.
> The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.
> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.
It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**
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[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.
[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.