The Communist Party wants to harness vast troves of online data to score people and companies on their behavior.
Straight out of the amazing series “Black Mirror,” imagine your government keeping a rating on everyone that shows how compliment they are. It looks like China is doing it, and there is no reason why the US is not doing it.
In China they will surely jail you when your score becomes bad, in the US it will be something less obvious, but most likely, just as damaging.
It’s the reason why privacy is so important and why all the NSA doting is very scary.
Source: China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone – The Washington Post
Having spend far too much time in China, this is downright freaky. One thing’s for sure, the people there seem to just go with the government flow. There are pockets of people who will protest, but the majority of the population thinks the government has their best interests in mind. They are fans of the “ignorance is bliss” policy. I spoke with many young adults who trust their government completely.
This seems very science fiction and could really harm people’s quality of life. On the other hand, the kind of data harvesting going on in the US is corporate and depreciates the value of our lives in less sexy ways by getting everyone mildly hooked on sites and apps and detached from the real world.
Semi-related caveat: I listened to an interview with Joe Hollier, the designer of the Light Phone, who won a spot in a Google design innovation incubator and was “frightened” by how each team’s concept centered around getting people addicted to the product as much as possible. So he developed a phone that had no internet capabilities instead.