Credit: Kevin Hong

By 2020, China is planning to assign a Trust Score to every one of its 1.3 billion citizens. If you live in China, almost everything you do will be run through an algorithm to determine how trustworthy you are. This would include your shopping patterns, people you are friends with on social media, your credit history etc. etc. Then, the resulting score will be used to determine whether you qualify for a loan, or a job, or even whether you’ll be able to get a visa to travel out of the country.

To many people, myself included, this is fundamentally wrong. It is a clear violation of individual freedoms and will destroy any notion of privacy. However, I think it is important to understand why the Chinese approach is flawed because the underlying goal of establishing trust between people is not necessarily a bad one.

First, let’s agree that knowing whether someone is trustworthy is a good thing. When you buy a used car or concert tickets from someone, you want to know that you are not getting a lemon. When you hire a babysitter or someone to do work on your house, you want to know they won’t run away with your money — or worse yet, steal something form your house. On the flip side, if you do work for someone, you want to make sure you’ll get paid as agreed.

In all these cases, and many many others, you need to know if you can trust the other person. Chances are, you already spend a lot of time and effort on figuring out exactly that (asking for references, looking people up on social media, running credit and background checks etc.). A social trust score would make this so much easier. More importantly, it would incentivize people to behave honestly with each other and would prevent a lot of fraud that currently plagues person-to-person transactions.

So — what’s wrong with the Chinese Trust Score then? There are more than just a few things, but here are the ones I have major issues with:

It is a mandatory monopoly: not only is there no alternative, but come 2020, you won’t be able to opt-out of it. Inability to opt-out is wrong on a philosophical level. Making it a monopoly is wrong on a practical one. Without competition, there will be little incentive to improve the algorithm over time. So, people will use the score not because it is an accurate way of gaging someone’s credibility, but because they have no choice. It is controlled by the government: this means that the government can adjust the algorithm as it sees fit. For example, they can make loyalty to the current regime a big factor in the score (and Chinese government will most likely do that). This makes it more of an “obedience score” rather than a “trust score”. The score does not belong to you: not only is the information that goes into the score gathered without your knowledge and permission, but the score itself can be used without your consent. This is by far the most troublesome aspect — it completely robs people of their privacy.

These negatives make the Chinese Trust Score much more harmful than useful — but they can help us define the characteristics of a trust score that would actually be beneficial:

It must be completely opt-in — nobody should be forced to participate, and people should be able to choose a trust score provider that they feel comfortable with. There should be a way to opt-out — if you decide to stop using a given trust score provider, you should be able to do so very easily, and all your personally-identifiable information should be removed from the system. It should be run by a private organization — the government (even a democratic one), should not be able to influence the composition of the score. The score should belong to you — you should be able to determine who can see your score, when they can see it, and how much other info you want to share with them.

Coincidentally, these are the same values that we based Credo360 on. Our goal is to build an independent, opt-in reputation system that protects your privacy. We believe that your reputation should belong to you, and that you should be able to use it whenever and wherever you see fit, and nobody else should be able to access it without your explicit permission.