If you’ve never heard of a Reputation System or a Social Credit System yet, here’s a quick brief:
Reputation systems are programs that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation.
Well not online anymore.
For those of you who watch Black Mirror, remember that episode Nodesive? It’s the first episode of the third season. It’s the one where people rate each other for every interaction they have with each other. You can read more about the episode here.
This futuristic idea is not very futuristic anymore. At least not in China!
China aims to develop a nation-wide reputation system with the intention to assign citizens a “social credit” (a rating/a score in other words) in which it indicates the person’s credibility based on his economic and social status, in addition to the government’s data about him and ratings of business operations.
Apparently, the system’s idea started in 2014/2015 (ref and another ref). And it seems that it has been recently deployed and is being used:
In this article, the Telegraph claimed that
Nine million Chinese have been banned from buying domestic flights, and three million more from buying business class tickets in early trials of the scheme, under which citizens are rated on their compliance with social norms and rules.
Behaviour that triggered the bans varied from obstructing footpaths with electric bikes to failing to pay fines.
Furthermore, Alibaba deployed a car vending machine that gives free test drives to citizens with “good” credit scores (read):
In China, the government rates citizens using a social ranking system. Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial’s credit ranking system is known as Zhima or Sesame Credit, and is an independent, opt-in, private credit scoring service. In an email to The Verge, Alibaba said users with a Zhima score below 700 will have to pay a fee. According to Wired, users start with a score of 550 when they have no transaction history, with scores ranging from 350 to 950.
I wanted to see people’s opinion on the matter, so I tried to discuss this on Reddit. (You can follow up here and here)
The results came as expected, some users accepted the system with some concerns, others totally refused it.
Here’s a summary of some different opinions:
- Multiple users showed concerns about “malice downvoting”. In their opinion, a mass attack downvoting a person could ruin his life. These users suggested that for the system to be trusted, there must be a way to “validate” the ratings.
- Other users thought that this is a huge invasion of privacy and an attempt to “control” people.
- Interestingly enough, a Chinese user said that the system is really interesting, but if it was to go live, the country will shut down because of how “bad behavior” is spread over there (“Interesting! I live in China and if this sticks the whole country will shut down. The telegraph article mentioned smoking, and while smoking in public has curtailed, the only place I’ve noticed that people don’t smoke is inside hospital rooms. People shove onto hospital elevators ahead of doctors pushing patients on hospital beds. It’s not uncommon to get the stink-eye from the guy going the wrong way on a one way street because he has to pull over to let you around.”).
- Finally, a user suggested that they should penalize bad behavior but not reward good ones. In his opinion, rewarding good behavior would encourage fake people and give them the sense to be good just to earn credits and not for the sense of goodness.
Personally, I have very mixed feelings about such system. Every user had a point. Arguably, each one of them made sense. Just like most of everything around us, I think it has its goods and its bads. However, a system that can have such huge impact on our lives can have different psychological effects on us.
I wish China goes slower on the implementation of this system. I would extend the research to real trials and experiments that could be done on volunteers. Observations must be made by sociologists and psychologists to see how, statistically, people would deal with such systems and how it would shape and affect their personalities.
What do you think?