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China credit score

kurtosis (86 posts) • +1

"I can't buy a house because of my evil jay-walking twin".

If it is used in the sense of a criminal record and credit scoring, it's an overdue help for China. Who wants to lend money to a fraud or have their child taken care of by a criminal after all?
But if all the rumors are true and they really let online and public behavior through artificial intelligence influence the score, it will be a disaster.

Data quality in China is already really bad in many vital areas. And artificial intelligence, while being a cool technology to play with, will create a lot of false matches - especially in an ethnically very homogeneous country like China. Even iPhone X's face recognition can't reliable tell people apart - not to mention a neural net that should tell billions of people apart, sometimes from awkward angles.

In the end, some perfectly law-abdient citizen would be punished for the crimes of others and there are no sufficient legal processes to clear their name. A sure-fire way to get people angry at the government...

Liumingke1234 (3297 posts) • 0

I agree. Also once you get tagged how easy will it be to correct it if they select the wrong person?

alienew (422 posts) • 0

All nuts. Don't call it socialism - other terms might apply, but some have dark connotations and I wouldn't want to repeat them here. At any rate, terms only mean what we make them mean through what we do or don't do.

JanJal (1243 posts) • 0

Based on this article, I wouldn't worry much.

There is the social credit scoring which will for sure be implemented in China.

Surveillance cameras have also obviously have been in use for long time and combining them with facial recognition will certaintly increase in future.

But this article mixes the topics needlesly, as if they were linked - yet never stating so.

Yes, surveillance cameras can identify people, but personally I am not worried that China would let software convert rule breaking observed on camera to automatic scoring of citizens.

Even if the scoring data would be "secure", it can never be so secure that eventually someone wouldn't publish a story about how some hotshot government figure couldn't board a flight because "he" got caught on camera buying drugs, or whatever.

Similar case, though through human action, was in Finland some time ago, when somebody noticed that Vladimir Putin was added to national police database of criminal suspects.

alienew (422 posts) • 0

@JanJal: For the most part, I agree about the mixing of surveillance/social credit scoring, at least for the present and immediate future. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to automatically accept new norms which drift down from above somewhere and soon become just another part of one's 'necessary' subconscious kneejerk adaptation to any social environment or engineering plan.

michael2015 (784 posts) • -1

It's a well known fact that Chinese tend to ignore government enacted rules, laws, and generally accepted social behavior to enhance culture and behavior to develop a more civilized society. Excellent examples of chronically uncivilized are Kunming's e-bike, pedestrian, and automobile drivers - civilians who toss their litter on the ground, adjacent to municipally provided trash receptacles.

It is also well known that Chinese people will eventually respond to negative as opposed to positive conditioning faster - albeit with occasional over the top protestations, such as berating and beating public security officers, government officials, and even teachers, doctors, etc.

While not a perfect system - I suspect this system will have an effective impact on helping the government engineer chinese society.

This plan has been several years in the making, so should be interesting to see whether it will be enforced and long-term effective.

Since respect and self discipline are not always taught in the home - seems the government has taken on this mantle of responsibility.

Geezer (1953 posts) • +1

This is a modern high tech exercise in Pavlovian conditioning. The supreme manifestation of control.

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