If you want to see the consequences of a society without privacy, you don’t need to imagine a dystopian future, or predict what the state of the world will be 30 years from now; instead, look at what’s happening in China right now:
China, in many respects, is the global leader in government surveillance. In the past few years, they’ve rapidly expanded their vast array of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in urban and rural areas alike. The government widely uses facial recognition technology, and Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Tencent (owner of the messaging platform WeChat), are required to share user data with the Chinese government.
How the government intends to use all this data is arguably more frightening than the mass surveillance effort itself. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a “social credit system” which uses surveillance data consolidated by the government to give each Chinese person a numerical social credit score used to evaluate their “trustworthiness.” In contrast to the American FICO credit score, the Chinese social credit score encompasses a broad array of surveillance data and could determine eligibility not only for financial credit, but also for basic services. The goal of the CCP is to reward “good” behavior and punish “bad” behavior.
What exactly constitutes bad behavior in the eyes of the Chinese government? The social-credit program is still in its infancy, so it remains somewhat unclear and subject to change, but early indicators suggest “bad” behavior could include things like jaywalking, spending too much time playing video games, and making unauthorized political speech. If you’re wondering what unauthorized political speech looks like, in one example, citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was recently sentenced to 4 years in prison for her early (accurate) reporting on the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
The score is also likely to not only include information about the actions of an individual but also the behavior of their friends and family. In practice, this means guilt by association, and dissidents who speak out against the government become social pariahs. Exacerbating this dynamic, the CCP last year expressed an interest in reinstating Fengqiao, the Mao-era policy where dissidents are rounded up and snitched on by their fellow citizens.
Why would Chinese people care so much about their social credit score? It could be used to determine their eligibility for a bank loan or mortgage, and directly limit their ability to travel internationally and domestically, access the internet, or receive a government pension.
Why you should care
Why did I pick China as the focus of my first post on my (mostly) US-centric privacy blog? The privacy and human rights violations in China are serious and warrant attention regardless of their broader global implications. Some rightfully argue that what’s happening in China couldn’t happen in democratic countries like the United States (at least in the short-term), and by extension that the problem is not the lack of privacy but the oppressive authoritarian governments.
While that’s true to an extent, China’s surveillance practices illustrate an instructive point: When our data ends up in the hands of powerful organizations that have the ability to influence our behavior the potential consequences are dire. Admittedly, less dire in the US than in China, but the erosion of privacy has the potential to disrupt liberties we take for granted even in the United States (more on that in the coming weeks).