Chinese Big Brother and implications for personal privacy

Personal data, privacy and cybersecurity were talked about extensively in Davos last week. In the current state of the world, governments can use troves of personal information to fuel state surveillance and authoritarianism or develop projects for the benefit of people.

China’s social credit system, for example, has been in the news quite often recently. The project is part terrifying, part fascinating. Fascinating from the perspective of government’s vision and ability to design a system of incentivising good behaviour interlinked across multiple facets of life. Terrifying as a major government intervention into private life and abuse of personal privacy, if there was any left in China. By 2020, Chinese government aims to analyse everyone’s behaviour across multiple categories from your shopping patterns to what you say on social media. They do take things even further though by looking at your social connections and their behaviour. It would be slightly less intrusive if the Chinese government just kept that information to themselves. Instead, they will issue everyone with a score and make that score public for everyone else to see. The system is currently being tested by over 30 local governments as well Tencent and Alibaba, and it works. Imagine the look on your friends’ faces when they find out you are bad company. What about your girlfriend? This score, a single number, will determine which job you get, your mortgage or personal loan rate, which school you or your kids can go to and your level of access to the outside world, among other things. I do hope that this system will incorporate some type of dispute resolution agency – otherwise, the fate of most human beings will be in the virtual hands of an algorithm and, of course, the Communist Party of China. This social credit experiment can create a perpetual tiered society with no upward mobility. And maybe that’s an ultimate goal. To give Xi Jinping some credit, the government did outline the rules of the game. Sort of. Now it’s up to each individual to decide how they want to play this one.

In all honesty, we shouldn’t have expected anything else from China. It was a bit surprising to hear Xi Jinping talk about globalisation at Davos last year where he outlined China’s global leadership ambition to fill the vacuum left by the US. While money talks, China’s track record on human rights, free speech and political freedom will make it an unlikely leader of the Western world.

I will further expand on this topic by writing about the probability of the Chinese experiment to be replicated elsewhere and discussing other attempts at social credit and government surveillance around the world.