China is watching. They’ve set in motion a plan that will eventually see its 1.4 billion citizens observed in every possible way, and all their various activities and behaviours weighed and measured. The goal is to rank Chinese citizens not just on their economic standing (more or less the same thing as the credit scores Western systems have used for decades) but also their social interactions and overall “trustworthiness.”

It’ll potentially be like Yelp for individuals, but one of the many concerns being voiced about this Social Credit System is that businesses want their name and reputation out in the public. Private citizens? Not so much.

The idea is being met with mixed reactions both inside and outside of China.

In most countries, the existence of a credit system isn’t a big deal. People are used to having their financial information used to determine whether or not they’ll be given a loan or a credit card in the future. For most of China, this in itself is a new idea. But China is taking the whole concept a few steps further.

Here’s what China has in mind: every Chinese citizen will have their daily activities constantly monitored and evaluated. What do they buy at the shops and online? Where are they at any given time? Who are their friends and how are they interacting with them? How many hours do they spend watching online content or playing video games, and what kind of content and games are enjoyed? What bills and taxes do they pay? Which do they not?

All these activities will be recorded and used as the basis of the new Social Credit System ranking.

After the Social Credit System rolls out in 2020, scores will influence a person’s rental applications, their ability to get insurance or a loan and even social security benefits. A low score will limit your career potential, because you will not be hired by certain employers who use it as character judgment. Some jobs will even be completely off-limits if scores don’t meet the guidelines.

After all, people working in the civil service, journalism and legal fields have to be trustworthy, right? And if that’s not bad enough, your children will suffer for your untrustworthiness by not being eligible to attend certain schools.

For years, the Communist Party in China has tracked the political and personal transgressions of every individual. A citizen’s record followed them for life, from schools to jobs. People started reporting on friends and even family members, raising suspicion and lowering social trust in China. The same thing will happen here but to an even greater extent.

People will have an incentive to censor their friends and family. Under the Social Credit System, a person’s score will not only go up and down based on what they themselves do. It will also be affected by what their online friends say and do, so if someone they are connected to online posts a negative comment on a website, their own score will also be dragged down.

The whole thing is being packaged by the Chinese government as a way to enhance “trust” nationwide and to build a culture of “sincerity”. Their stated policy puts it like this: “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.”

It sounds a bit invasive, but the truth is most of that already happens thanks to the data-collecting devices people carry around all the time, and the companies like Google, Facebook and Instagram that enable it. But China wants to collect, collate and use the data to power a system where all these behaviors are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number (otherwise known as a Citizen Score).

This number will tell everyone whether or not a person is trustworthy and a good Chinese citizen, and everyone would be able to see it, too; ratings would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine everything from eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where children can go to school, or even a person’s chances of getting a date.

Before you start wrinkling your nose and tut-tutting about how awful all this is, consider this: Facebook identifies you in pictures that anyone posts, and it doesn’t even need to see your face. With only just your clothes, hair and body type, it can image tag you with 83% accuracy. All kinds of companies collect and analyze the data you provide with your various devices and are able to predict your actions, perhaps better than you can predict yourself.  

It won’t be easy keeping constant and pervasive tabs on 1.4 billion people, but technology will help. New innovations like like facial recognition and artificial intelligence will assist Beijing to identify and track the Chinese people as it works on putting together an enormous national surveillance system.

In fact, governments around the world are already in the business of monitoring and rating. In 2011, the US National Security Agency described its “New Collection Posture” toward global electronic communication as, “Know It All…Collect It All…Process It All…Exploit It All.” Sounds like a Big Brother poster catchphrase.

It’s all there in the policy entitled “Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking”. The policy is pretty clear about what happens if you mess up:

“If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.”

And they do mean everywhere. People with low ratings will have slower internet speeds, for example. Their access to social activities such as eating out or playing a round of golf could be removed, and the “restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses means they will lose the right to travel freely abroad.

As the government document states, the social credit system will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

And it will all be public.

It is estimated that China has 200 million surveillance cameras, which is four times as many as the United States. But China’s population is a bit more than four times that of the United States. And China’s not the only country that uses advanced facial recognition software in these cameras; in 2017 the US director of National Intelligence held an open contest for facial recognition algorithms, which was won by a Chinese company. 

China is not content to rely solely on behaviors tracked by cameras, apps or other official means. They have a long history of encouraging its citizens of helping it keep track of one another. This new universal ranking system will be no different, and ratting out a friend, neighbor or family member for double-plus-ungood activities will benefit your own Citizen Score even if it does cause theirs to plummet.

It’s still just a plan, though. At the moment, it’s in its test phase. The government has approved eight pilot projects, and is watching closely how these eight Chinese companies issue their own “social credit” scores and how the populace reacts.

Right now, participation in these test Citizen Scores is voluntary, but by 2020 the full nation-wide system is supposed to be in place, and it will be mandatory. The behavior of every single citizen and legal person (which includes every company or other entity) in China will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.

One of the most high-profile projects underway is by Sesame Credit, the financial wing of Alibaba. Its 400 million users make Alibaba the world’s biggest online shopping platform, which puts it in the ideal position to leverage its unique database of consumer information to compile individual social credit scores.

Individuals on Sesame Credit are measured by a score ranging between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba won’t say what “complex algorithm” it uses to calculate the number, but they do reveal the five factors that go into creating it. The first is credit history, which is the same “do you pay your bills” sort of thing most countries use for credit ratings.

It’s interesting to note that this is a very new thing for most Chinese people. Many people don’t own houses or cars, let alone credit cards in China, so that kind of information isn’t available to measure. The central bank has the financial data on 800 million people, but only 320 million have a traditional credit history. That makes the way Alibaba’s 400 million people interact financially incredibly valuable information.

The second factor that goes into the Sesame Credit score is fulfillment capacity, which it defines in its guidelines as “a user’s ability to fulfill his/her contract obligations”. Next are personal characteristics, verifying personal information such as someone’s mobile phone number and addres — all of this seems pretty straightforward. Are you real, and can you meet your financial obligations.

But then it gets a little dicier when it comes to the other two ways they build the score, which all come down to a person’s character.

The last category used in Alibaba’s ranking is interpersonal relationships. Friends matter. Their choice of who they interact with online and the type and quality of these interactions say something about the person being assessed. If your friends list is populated by people with low scores, you can expect your own score to suffer as a result.

As well, what you say online is monitored. If you share what Sesame Credit calls “positive energy” online, which would be things like nice messages about the government or how well the country’s economy is doing, it will make your score go up. It stands to reason that posting a critical message will have the opposite effect. This is communist China, after all.

Under this system, something as innocuous as a person’s shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of products they buy. “Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person,” says Li Yingyun, Sesame’s Technology Director. “Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility.”

Knowing this, people will be encouraged to adopt the kinds of behavior that will earn them a better score, which of course are the exact behaviors that the Chinese government think are acceptable.

Sesame Credit already offers tips to help individuals improve their ranking, including warning about the downsides of friending someone who has a low score. There are tangible benefits to a good score, too. Sesame has promoted these consumer benefits, and it goes beyond just VIP reservations with hotels and car rental companies. Users can flaunt their good credit scores not only to friends, but also to potential mates.

At the moment, there’s no direct penalty for being “untrustworthy,” only treats for good behavior. But Hu Tao, Sesame Credit’s chief manager, warns people the system is designed so that “untrustworthy people can’t rent a car, can’t borrow money or even can’t find a job.” Sesame Credit has also approached China’s Education Bureau about sharing a list of its students who cheated on national examinations, in order to make them pay into the future for their dishonesty.

China’s biggest matchmaking service, Baihe, has teamed up with Sesame to promote clients with good credit scores, giving them prominent spots on the company’s website. More and more of Baihe’s 90 million clients are displaying their credit scores in their dating profiles, which is the exact opposite of the Western concept that a credit score is a private matter.

“A person’s appearance is very important,” explains Baihe’s vice-president, Zhuan Yirong. “But it’s more important to be able make a living. Your partner’s fortune guarantees a comfortable life.” As China’s society experiences massive shifts due to its expanding economy and changing role on the world stage, its people are also looking to experience different lifestyles than the ones they’ve been used to. Part of that includes find a suitable partner who can assist in this rapid upward mobility.

Speaking of gamification, a mobile phone game designed by Sesame Credit encourages users to guess whether they have higher or lower credit scores than their friends. Everyone is pressured to openly shares their ratings. It seems to be working, too. Higher scores are a status symbol, with 100,000 people bragging about their scores on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) within months of the app’s launch.

When it rolls out for real in 2020, the national database on citizens will go way beyond what they buy on Alibaba. It will merge a wide variety of information on every citizen, assessing whether taxes and traffic tickets have been paid, whether academic degrees have been rightly earned and even, it seems, whether females have been instructed to take birth control. And the days of suffering no direct penalty for a low score will be long over.

A lengthy planning document from China’s elite State Council explains that social credit will “forge a public opinion environment that trust-keeping is glorious,” and explains that the “new system will reward those who report acts of breach of trust.” In other words, the government’s Social Credit System is basically a big data gamified version of the surveillance methods that Chinese people have lived with for a long time.

If you think that only China would dare to use people’s social media and other data trails to judge its citizens for appropriate behavior, remember that in 2015 the US Transportation Security Administration started flouting the idea of expanding the PreCheck background checks to include social media records, location data and purchase history.

Our world is one of predictive algorithms that determine if we are a threat, a risk, a good citizen and even if we are trustworthy. The Chinese system of expanding credit scoring into life scoring is coming to a Western Democracy near you, it’s just a matter of time. And probably not a lot of time, either.

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