It can range from not paying fines when you're deemed fully able to, misbehaving on a train, standing up a taxi, or driving through a red light. "It's according to which place you're in, because they have their own catalogs," she says. The criteria that go into a social credit ranking depends on where you are, notes Ohlberg. There's a difference between getting a low social credit score and being blacklisted by the government, such as for refusing to pay a fine. Some reports talk about a blacklist that's part of the official government social credit system, which means if you owe the government money, for example, you could lose certain rights. "Individuals will have ID-linked codes." It's less a score, she says, and more of a record. "If you go to a credit China website, and you have an entity's credit code, you can type that in and pull up credit records," explains Hoffman. The target, eventually, is that the government system will be country wide, with businesses given a "unified social credit code" and citizens an identity number, all linked to permanent record. That's a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it's analysed to spit out a score or ranking, though Sesame does share some details about what types of data is used. "You'll have sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens," Ohlberg adds. What's troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings - which is already happening with some pilots, she says. "It kind of rides on the fashion for social credit."
WHAT IS CCCP ON MY APPS LICENSE
It's not officially part of the system, and doesn't have a license though the pilot is approved, and indeed encouraged, it could one day be shut down by the government. "What happened is some of the media took the private pilots, like Sesame Credit… and presented it as the social credit system," she says. That leads to misunderstanding of what the social credit system actually is, notes Ohlberg. Sesame Credit says this is only with user consent. To be a bit more confusing, the data collected by private companies is expected to be hoovered up by the government in the future, and some of the data is already used in government trials. The private systems, including Ant Financial's Sesame Credit, often get conflated with the government plans, though they aren't part of the official system. Unveiled in a 2014 plan, pieces of the system are already in place, and the Chinese government appears to be targeting a 2020 goal to get the rest in place, though that's less a deadline and instead marks the end of a planning period, says Samantha Hoffman, non-resident fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. "It's both unique and part of a global trend." What is China's social credit system? "But if does come together as envisioned, it would still be something very unique," she says. Nor is the use, and abuse, of aggregated data for analysis of behaviour. "The idea itself is not a Chinese phenomenon," says Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Caught jaywalking, don't pay a court bill, play your music too loud on the train - you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket. China's social credit system expands that idea to all aspects of life, judging citizens' behaviour and trustworthiness.