My mother in law is already paranoid, warning us not to talk about certain topics with her. Scary stuff.
I should point out that my MIL is a completely apolitical person who worked in the Chinese government for her entire career, spending most of that time just helping poor people, without a shred of corruption. She has nothing to worry about, doesn't care about politics, and even she's paranoid about this.
Nice thing is you can use this in an offensive manner too.
Japanese forums have been raided by Chinese trolls in the past. Now the Japanese just post a statement about Tienanmen square and poof, no more Chinese attendance, as the Great Firewall starts blocking...
Interesting times.
If i where a dictator, i would punnish whoever pitched this as a traitor- after all- now you are cut off from all true information, you get the perfect soap opera- no matter how the people feel, until the day the fluffy thunderclouds around you decide its time for a chain reaction.
How this could seem to anyone in power a good idea- i will never know.
Is it fair to say this is objectionable mostly due to the government enforcement of one "score" per person?
After all, we have a "karma score" here on HN and we think it's great... in part, presumably, because it's opt-in and it doesn't follow you around.
Is there a middle ground? As in, an identity service that offers this kind of "trustworthiness score" across services but it's opt-in and you can have as many "identities" as you'd like. You could use a high-trust real-name identity with certain online accounts like banks but also have the ability to use throw-away identities for anonymous browsing and commenting? If such an identity protocol included some kind of cryptographic chain of proof as a way to validate the trustworthiness, it could be quite useful.
Does anyone believe that this is only for citizens? It wouldn't be that hard to extend a score for the rest of the world. Your online profile could very well affect your travel.
Is there a way to check this score somewhere somehow when outside of China? My family in-law is Chinese but I just do not hear anything about this from them.
It will be interesting to see how YC helps with this as their investment and relationship with China deepens.
(see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16919952)
Update: my account has just been throttled and I cannot make further comments:/
I wonder about the after market to identify and target 'low scoring' individuals.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
Which has a concept of "social score".
Which countries are likely to emulate or avoid this type of system?
Now just add in some "basic income" and...
Chinas NEP is over.
This is just scary.
Sounds straight out of Black Mirror
Is this really such a bad thing for developing countries ? In India, for instance , powerful people use twitter to call for rape and murder of their opponents regularly and politicians justify rape. These are just a small minority of people -- however they are extra-ordinarily vocal and their "free speech" scares all the decent people.
Of course , Social Credit score has no place in western liberal democracies but maybe Social Credit score is not a bad idea for developing countries where ignorant people outnumber educated people ,where depraved medieval traditions still hold sway.
This has been discussed couple of times earlier too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788296
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13201926