The Chinese government have watched Black Mirror, season 3 episode 1 ("Nosedive" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive) and thought, "yep, that sounds a thoroughly good idea". The resemblance is infinitely closer to reality, and infinitely more disturbing, than the silly incident with the pig.
Known by the anodyne name “social credit,” this system is designed to reach into every corner of existence both online and off. It monitors each individual’s consumer behavior, conduct on social networks, and real-world infractions like speeding tickets or quarrels with neighbors. Then it integrates them into a single, algorithmically determined “sincerity” score. Every Chinese citizen receives a literal, numeric index of their trustworthiness and virtue, and this index unlocks, well, everything. In principle, anyway, this one number will determine the opportunities citizens are offered, the freedoms they enjoy, and the privileges they are granted.
The social-credit system was based explicitly on a familiar, Western model: the credit score. As a de facto reputation index, your credit score strongly conditions where you can rent, what kind of jobs or educational opportunities you’ll be eligible for, even what mode of travel you use to get around. This one number—formulated by obscure means, by largely unaccountable organizations, then used as a gating mechanism by a profusion of third parties, mostly in secret—has become what it was never meant to be: a general proxy for trustworthiness.
Citizens with higher social-credit scores enjoy discounts or upgrades on products and services, like hotel rooms or internet connectivity. Those who wear virtue on their sleeves further—perhaps by taking public transit consistently instead of driving to work, taking out the recycling regularly, or even denouncing a misbehaving neighbor—might enjoy new benefits, like being able to rent a flat with no deposit, or earning the right to send their children to exclusive schools. This hardly sounds like authoritarianism run amok... [Umm, WHAT?!?!? I'm a lefty and even I think that's ridonculous]
Attend a “subversive” political meeting or religious service, for example, or frequent known haunts of vice, or do under-the-table business with an unregistered, informal enterprise, and the idea is that the network will know about it and respond by curtailing one’s privileges. The state wants its citizens to believe that there’s little point in trying to evade detection of such acts, especially when they are strongly correlated with suspicious sites, either by mobile-phone location data or by China’s extensive national network of facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras. Once detected, the system promises to pass judgment on the things a citizen is and is not permitted to do, buy, or access. And with no recourse in real time, no ability to appeal, and nowhere to turn for help... Private, commercial transactions—renting a car, reserving a hotel room, buying a plane ticket—become venues for state-directed punishment for nonconformity.
The implementation of social credit has been piecemeal so far: partial, local, and experimental. And there have been some encouraging signs of popular resistance to imposed “sincerity.” In the coastal province of Zhejiang, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Page and Eva Dou report that locals have rejected a digital tool intended to let them inform on neighbors, on the grounds that it reminds them of the Cultural Revolution–style denunciations that remain within the living memory of elders.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/chinas-dangerous-dream-of-urban-control/553097/?utm_source=feed
The most frightens me not the fact that Chinese government wants to implement it, but the fact that in our world there's a lot of corporations/institutions which want the same but are not so brave...
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