China's Citizen Score system combines surveillance of your social media and social graph with your credit report, your purchase history and state spy agencies and police files on you to produce a "trustworthiness" score — people who score low are denied access to high-speed travel, financial products, and other services like private school for their kids.
Also: being friends with low-scoring people pulls your score down.
Liu Hu is a Chinese journalist who is critical of the state — he was recently ordered to apologize for critical social media posts and then sanctioned for being "insincere" — and it has earned him a low Citizen Score. Now he can't buy airplane tickets or property, or send his kid to private school.
When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” he said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”
China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy
[Ben Tracy/CBS]
(via /.)
