Please go read the article in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant entitled China rates its own citizens – including online behavior (hat tip Ernie Davis).

In the article, it describes China’s plan to use big data techniques to score all of its citizens – with the help of China internet giants Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent – in a kind of expanded credit score that includes behavior and reputation. So what you buy, who you’re friends with, and whether you seem sufficiently “socialist” are factors that affect your overall score.

Here’s a quote from a person working on the model, from Chinese Academy of Social Science, that is incredibly creepy:

When people’s behavior isn’t bound by their morality, a system must be used to restrict their actions

And here’s another quote from Rogier Creemers, an academic at Oxford who specializes in China:

Government and big internet companies in China can exploit ‘Big Data’ together in a way that is unimaginable in the West

I guess I’m wondering whether that’s really true. Given my research over the past couple of years, I see this kind of “social credit scoring” being widely implemented here in the United States.