Note from Pastor Kevin Lea: More evidence that a very oppressive police state is coming to the entire world, just as the books of Daniel and Revelation foretold.
So here’s an interesting bit of news: China is putting together a credit scoring system.
Well, that doesn’t sound that interesting. But wait till you hear the details.
According to ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley, the system will not just use your financial history, as in the U.S. credit system, but will have a much more “Big Data” approach and will include all of your data — including from your social network account and search history. In fact, the system will be run by Tencent and Alibaba, the companies that run China’s biggest social networks.
“Used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping,” Stanley writes. “Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.”
But wait, that’s not all. “In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like.”
But wait! It gets even better! “It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them.”
And obviously, a high score is explicitly tied to receiving government benefits. Already, people in China are bragging on social networks about getting high scores.
Welcome, as they say, to the Brave New World.
Which, in a post-Snowden era, inevitably raises the question: “Could this happen in the United States?”
I wish the answer was just laughter, and not of the grim kind.
At least without the political compliance bit, Silicon Valley startups are already hard at work, and lavishly funded by venture capital firms, at this very idea, to turn your social networking data into better credit rating information. And in itself, that’s not necessarily bad financial innovation — lending money to people who couldn’t repay it, after all, was a big factor in the 2008 financial crisis.
But could it morph into something more?
In the left-wing paranoid’s version of the story, you could imagine this as a purely private initiative — say, an alliance between Facebook, Google, and Apple and major banks, to provide this as a public service. Of course, you could “opt out” any time you’d like, but you’d find out that if you didn’t opt in, you couldn’t get a credit card, or you couldn’t rent an apartment. Maybe eventually the sort of “speech” that would harm your score wouldn’t be political as much as anti-corporate or anti-consumerist. For instance, your score would take a hit if you’re critical of the way corporate America is relentlessly hostile to family life.
To continue reading this article in its entirety go to:
http://theweek.com/articles/581752/chinas-tyrannical-new-credit-score-warning-america