China has instituted a creepy mandatory ranking system for its online shitizens where higher scores bring special privileges. Some of their sheeple have completely institutionalized the surveillance and are bragging about their high scores. In addition to creditworthiness, the scores also rank on political compliance, including that of your online friends. Oopsie, you have a mouthy blogger friend? Better dump them quickly along with denouncing them too. Big Brother would definitely approve. As for China elites, of course they will have high scores since they will control the system. The scoring system is corrupt at core.
This is where all the government’s moves towards greater control of the internet comes to fruition. To keep “score,” the government needs to tie IDs to online activity. Keeping the internet within the government’s walls makes it that much easier. But it’s not just online activity that will affect “citizen scores.” It’s almost every aspect of their lives.
Most disheartening is the fact that many citizens seem to view higher scores as status symbols.
Zero Hedge responds “How do you say “fucking morons” in Mandarin?”
It’s a perfect storm of terrible: the program will be administered by Alibaba (China’s answer to Amazon) and Tencent (the country’s huge, government-compliant social network). Your score will be generated not only by your activities, but by the activities of the friends in your social graph — the people you identify as friends on social media. Your score will be decremented for doing things like mentioning Tienanmen Square or speculating on official corruption, or for participating in activities that the state wishes to “nudge” you away from, like playing video-games.
But of course it can’t happen here.
From ZH comments.
USA is already doing this.
Intrado, the provider of 911 services in USA/CANDA provides an application named “Beware” to police, fire, and emts.
This application crawls the web, uses social media, banking records, recent purchases, arrest records, etc..It then creates a COLOR CODED THREAT SCORE for the person.
Interview with Intrado VP Steve Reed: