“I’m on the Tianjin to Beijing train and the automated announcement just warned us that breaking train rules will hurt our personal credit scores!” tweeted Emily Rauhala, Washington Post’s China correspondent. What’s China’s personal or social credit score?
Rating people’s loyalty to CPC
The Chinese government is in the process of developing a national “social credit” scoring system that may rate people on everything from their credit-worthiness to their loyalty to the Communist Party. Most people in China pay with their phones and apps the keep track of their behaviour. Just last week, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s affiliate Ant Financial was forced to apologise after users said they felt misled into allowing its Alipay service to share data on their spending habits with Ant’s credit-scoring arm and other third-party services. Ant Financial’s credit-scoring unit Sesame Credit may someday feed data into the ‘social credit’ scoring system
Perks for people with high ranks
In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech companies granted approval from the People’s Bank of China to develop their own private credit scoring platforms, writes journalist Mara Hvistendahl in Wired. Sesame Credit tracks the user’s behaviour and scores between 350 and 950. Depending on the scores, it offers perks and sometimes penalises or even blacklists people with low ‘marks’
Better degree? Better scores
The app’s algorithm considers not only whether you repay your bills but also what you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores of your friends, adds Hvistendahl. Sesame credit has in fact already shared with the government, a list of 6 million people who have defaulted on court fines
According to Xinhua, the state news agency, this union of big tech and big government has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million defaulters, who opened the app one day to find their scores plunging