My personal prediction for the US is that Americans will continue to rail against Chinese-style government oversight of a social credit system while supporting private institutions that de-facto create the same system without government oversight, laws to mandate the information in the datasets pass a smell-test for truth, etc. We already have financial credit reporting agencies and private organizations scraping datasets for mugshots, court cases, and legal sanctions; couple that with some social media datasets and you've got a potential employer's dream tool for candidate screening.
America tends to run so hard from the risk of a Big Brother scenario that they end up smacking into Snow Crash without even realizing it.
There is a similarity and Americans can be hypocritical, however the Chinese-style oversight is more dangerous. Big tech companies cannot prevent you from traveling, living at certain places, and buying stuff. The Chinese system can. To me, the Chinese social credit system is far more terrifying than Facebook owning all of my pictures and social data.
I've posted this article before, in response to a similar comment. This system isn't exactly what you might think. I greatly encourage further discussion or criticism having to do with this piece and this system in general:
The article title flat-out says the "social credit score isn't real", and then outlines in a nuanced way exactly how it is real.
Sure, there is plenty of negative rhetoric that surrounds the topic, but at best what I can understand here is that there is no (verified) single aggregate score being leveraged against anyone...?
Amazon can ban your account. You can get put on the No Fly list.
Not to mention the Drone Strike List,
> ...former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
These moral/technical equivalency memes I don't think hold water.
Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted.
Court cases and mugshots are public information and a matter of transparency. When you murder someone, well, that's part of the deal. That's very different from the government measuring other, minute aspects of your life and making it public to everyone.
If your social media posts are marked private - which is your choice - then for the most part they're not going to be available to arbitrary 3rd parties, moreover, there are definitely social media solutions you can use that don't share anything.
There is an ongoing war over your information mostly for advertising by the way (not hiring) and hopefully some legislation will take care of that, and some dialogue over NSA/Snowden type things. Thankfully, there are actually laws, warrants, judges in the mix.
Surely we have to judge China's actions from a completely different angle, as they have their own history, social system etc. - but the equivalency arguments just don't work.
I think if you tried to text someone a message about Obama, and it was magically deleted by the US government, it would send shivers down your spine, and however political or not you were, you'd be signed up for the first protest/action - as would most of us.
We all have some concerns about our system but it's manageable - what's happening in China is right out of a novel.
Also note that 'it's just begun'. This is possibly only the first tranche.
The de-facto objective may be to leverage tech to it's max - the result is effective total control over everyone's lives.
Oh yes, they're very different. It's just not necessarily the case that one is to be preferred over the other.
I don't expect in a US structure my Obama texts would be hidden or deleted.
I think they'd be put on blast by multiple competing systems that are semi-automated to seek out and publicize "undesirable" behavior, and I'd end up receiving death threats from anonymous sources, sanctions from my employer, etc.
The outcomes are different, and I think the jury's out on which one is better. In fact, it's probably a personal preference.
"I think they'd be put on blast by multiple competing systems that are semi-automated to seek out and publicize "undesirable" behavior, and I'd end up receiving death threats from anonymous sources, sanctions from my employer, etc."
I disagree.
I don't see any future where your gmails or SMSs are going to be sold to arbitrary 3rd parties so your 'future employers' can read them.
It's different yes, but let's not pretend like this is a conversation around an "open-society" vs a "closed" one. They are not the same, but there is overlap. For example, the employment of academics in the US being in jeopardy if they choose to criticize Israel.
> I don't see any future where your gmails or SMSs are going to be sold to arbitrary 3rd parties so your 'future employers' can read them.
Doesn't Google read gmails? Doesn't Google have agreements with 3rd parties related to using information from those gmails? Is it hard to imagine that, as with Facebook, Google making that information directly available?
An aside, but often those equivalencies can be exposed by asking which country you’d rather live in. Can be applied to people who romanticise about “simpler lives” in developing countries as much as those denigrating the west and praising authoritarian regimes.
No one sufficiently educated wants to think the west is somehow superior, but at least when it comes to choosing where you’d prefer to be born, western countries offer huge advantages.
Your comments have entirely nothing to do with state regimes who monitor or coerce arbitrary citizens arbitrary communications.
FYI 'Julian Assange' is wanted for specific crimes, this is normal in any nation - hopefully, if he is arrested, he'll have a chance to defend himself against specific claims. That would be a very, very public trial with a lot of scrutiny.
... and 'Russia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Venezuela' are not 'notable examples' of anything in this context.
For the USA, this is about about national pride and personal revenge. Trump said that a death sentence is appropriate.
The trial and accusation might be kept secret. Like in Guantanamo and similar places around the world where people are held captive without trial and where torture is normal.
Do you really think the world is worried about Julian Assange because a fair trial is expected ?
Do you really think that he has spent his life in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2012 because a fair trial is expected ?
Do you really think that Ecuador has protected Julian Assange in the embassy since 2012 because a fair trial is expected ?
I guess you are one of the US citizens who promote hate and war against Russia and China and thus want to censor free speech and messages to defend and promote your worldview.
Your words from the first comment I replied to: Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted.
Your last comment proves that you are no better and you would love to have my comments deleted or having me banned from HN.
I guess it is also you who downvotes my comments.
You know you have nothing to say against the proofs that I linked.
Last time I looked Russia (not even talking about USSR) not only promoted but is quite involved in war in Ukraine that had killed thousands of people already. Georgia. Transnistria, etc. Thousands of people (mostly civilians, of course) were killed in Chechnia alone.
Pointing at Russia, of all places, as some kind of counter-example is laughable at best.
whataboutism at it's best...Russia is a sponsor in the Syrian war. Besides, neither China nor Russia need the excuse of war to harm or murder, it's called 'reeducation'.
Typically used by people who have nothing else to say.
I did not write anything to excuse China.
I wrote something that accuses the USA and our western democracies of being far worse than China for the world. Something very relevant regarding the fear mongering against Russia and China promoted by the message in the linked article that also promotes the worldview that the USA and the western democracies are beacons of goodness that must act against Russia and China.
Besides, Russia was invited by the official and elected Syrian president. The USA invaded Syria and promoted terrorism. You should read about what Syrian people think about Russia and the USA in their country.
> I wrote something that accuses the USA and our western democracies of being far worse than China for the world.
I think that's a denial of reality, though. Soviet Russia killed roughly 10 million of its own people [1]. Mao's Great Leap forward killed roughly 45 million people. [2] This isn't some "they mucked around in someone else's backyard--cultural interference!!!" badness. Together, Russia and China killed the same number of people that World War II did (~ 55 million), and they did this to their own subjects. What the U.S. and other Western democracies did was to prevent these horrors from visiting the rest of the world.
What Russia and China had in common, and still do, is that they were, and still are, totalitarian dictatorships. China happens to be the largest, most technologically advanced one we've ever seen. But it still is one. Totalitarian dictatorships are worse for the world. History has taught this much, at least.
You won't hear me claiming that USA and Western democracies are "beacons of goodness", but it's silly to say "Nay! Nay! They're worse!"
We are in 2019. Important things have changed since 1933.
Although unrelated but in reply to your message: China is a totalitarian dictatorship but I wonder if more Chinese people support it than US people support Trump or Clinton or any other of the war criminal mass murder US presidents that US democracy had elected in the last century.
I hope that the Green Party or another reasonable party will be elected in the USA in 2020.
Besides: AFAIK it is possible for many to use VPN in China to access the internet privately without censorship and without punishment.
> Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted.
FaceBook does this sort of thing, except instead of deleting the post, they omit it from feeds, and immediately bury it in the historical archive part of the UI.
Example: A friend of mine’s brother died, and his only updates were about a scone or something. After hearing about the death through other channels, I had to click around for about five minutes (I don’t use Facebook much...) to find the touching post he wrote, and link to the / funeral arrangements.
I remember some weeks ago, I sent over a picture of the Chinese President as Winnie the Poo (a popular meme at the time) to some friends on WeChat. It showed up as sent in my WeChat but my friends confirm it never actually reached them. Maybe 10 minutes later, it had been deleted from the chat logs on my phone as well.
You can also block screenshots, scaled, noises, recolored, cropped, occluded images, but you have to send a larger model to the device.
That’s not the point though. The point is that the expectation moving forward with these platforms is that you police yourself, or the machine learning algorithms will do it for you (and also ban you from mortgages, airplanes, employment, etc, if it has to intervene too frequently).
Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement.
LinkedIn is a bit further down the slippery slope, since it’s able to influence hiring decisions (and is joined to the MS Office 365 cloud, presumably).
Amazon Now had some related screwup recently where it redlined minority neighborhoods in a bunch of cities, since it used spending habits to predict they’d be less profitable.
> Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement.
Facebook (and Twitter, and Patreon, and countless other firms) will block you from posting if you post something that they regard as violating their policy. And "what is against policy" is a fuzzy enough line that "don't use Winnie the Poo pictures to make fun of the effin' President of the country" is a lot clearer than that. You may agree with the policy or not, you may think it's misguided, but WeChat is a private firm, and private firms aren't restricted by anything like the First Amendment. They provide services to you at their pleasure.
If e2e encryption is on one extreme, wechat is on the other. You have to link your account to a government id if you are the owner of a large group chat.
I dont get it. We are concerned over IP theft. Meanwhile China has the Great Firewall and mass surveillance apparatus. Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses' So doesnt their IT infrastructure and super snooping ability figure out who are the transgressors? Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith? Is it because we are doing the same? or is it because the offenders are 'too big to punish'?
> Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses'
He is lying.
> Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith?
Why do they need to show good faith? U.S. businesses don't go to China for good faith, they go to make money. China will do whatever it wants, right up to the very edge of what will harm their economic growth.
I think it's refreshing that finally someone with some notoriety speaks out openly against the threat of a dictatorship/authoritarian China paired with sentient technologies. Even if it's Soros.
Most people are too tied to the corporation "benefits" to speak out against the evil Chinese government and its arms Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba. Even though many countries have now banned Huawei (US, Japan, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan), and others are thinking of banning (Canada, Germany, Poland), most aren't openly castigating China with exception of US and Taiwan. And even then, even though the US president is one of the few individuals that is openly confrontational with the Chinese regime, he still sometimes offers a conciliary tone. Even muslim countries like Pakistan and Malaysia that suffer from their religioius brothers imprisoned by the millions, raised a few outbursts but then went silent.
What's the end game for China, and indeed the world? One dystopian preview is Ma Boyong's award winning short story "City of Silence", published as part of Ken Liu's Invisible Planets.
The end game seems to be moving more and more toward armed conflict between China and the US. I honestly don’t see both societies continuing their current trajectories without running headlong into each other. Perhaps it will just be another cold war and we’ll see who’s economic system blinks first.
That is the narrative they are trying to push.
IMO it is more a case between the globalists and the non-globalists. Some groups of people want it to be an interconnected world with 1 society.
It's funny how privacy protections are turning out. Every week or so we see the same pattern repeat. The BIG problem with privacy is government data sharing. Medical records, police records, travel records, financial records, ... we keep hearing stories of real people really getting hurt because of these data sharing agreements.
And yet all we hear about is Google data sharing, Facebook data sharing. And when it comes to problems with that, we hear about a few commercial disputes.
And yet in law the situation is that we are protecting against the second case, with everywhere exceptions for the first case. And while I'm happy for such protections, I feel protections against government data sharing (especially against them sharing mistakes/inaccuracies/out of date info) would have much more positive results.
My feeling is that there will be more and more data sharing and we're going to have to reorganize our society around the assumption of transparency. Cheap cameras connected to the cloud will continue to proliferate and face recognition software will get better and more widely available. Trying to prevent big corporations and the government from using data about people is going to be an uphill battle, and probably hopeless. If you start from the assumption that massive amounts of data on people will be collected and exist, I don't see how you successfully keep it all secret without turning into a police state.
The solution will be to make this data available to everyone. Not just government and the financially powerful, but everyone.
Some types of activities should remain private, especially when it's practical to do so. Encryption works, so conversations can be private so long as all participants agree. Certain types of medical records should be kept private, and some types of legal records where few people are involved. But general activity that falls outside of the bands that society has deemed worthy of special protection should be considered public.
Travel records? Forget it, that stuff's all over the place. As far as financial records, society has an interest when large sums of money are involved. IMHO we'd be better off if privacy and wealth were inversely correlated.
and you cannot sue Uncle Sam. Furthermore, govt data is being withheld from public access because of the shutdown - yet those fat congressmen and senators continue to draw paychecks upwards of 200k.
There's currently no one 'social credit score' in China. There's some local government pilots and some private enterprise "credit scores." The ones you hear about often are stuff like Alipay's Sesame Credit, which gives you a score based on your activities in Alibaba's app ecosystem. Currently, Sesame credit is pretty harmless, and gives you discounts on online orders or financial products if your score is good. The danger is that the national government will soon get its ducks in order and hoover all this data into one overarching national credit score and use that to police behavior.
That's when you are sued in court for refusing to pay back money you owe to another person or company. Then your access to 'luxury' lifestyle is limited, flight, high speed rails, and five star hotels are included in those limitations.
Except instead of applying to known terrorists or criminals, it applies to people who posted something the government doesn't like on social media, or have been unemployed for too long.
I guess the main thing I've heard about is the debtor-shaming. But I've also heard of people being restricted from social services like transport based on random stuff like not exercising enough (as tracked by a smartwatch). Maybe that was just hearsay.
We make a big hoo-ha about “social credit”, but I would argue that western financial credit scores function (or will function) in a very similar way given the amount of data some of the third party credit score providers pull and can pull in. The threat is huge because pretty much everyone needs credit to buy a home, and if you’re not a good boy or girl, that possibility will be taken from you.
And here’s the dark feeling: Facebook profile and use creates a personality profile. Personality profile is valid credit-score data. That data was possibly stolen from FB. If so, your financial credit score (and by axiom social credit score) is now available to anyone who will pay for it.
I’ve been particularly aware of this, because as a self-employed entrepreneur, my credit score has taken a pummeling - I think largely due to erratic cash flow. I see it as a long term threat to risk-taking. Basically, the lesson is clear: by seeking to change things, as entrepreneurs do, you’re not being a good boy or girl.
He's an adherent to Poppers philosophies, but he doesn't seem to acknowledge the inherent contradictions posed: "We must be intolerant of intolerance to have a tolerant society".
Furthermore, he is a heart a trader, so people are skeptical of his motives. You can make lots of money in the process of destabilizing a society.
Hi is perceived as a defender of democratic systems who has seen fascism - and the war that inevitably follows it - at its worst. He has donated the bulk of his fortune to a foundation that follows this philosophy.
He has literally made a lot of money in chaotic situations, and sometimes even orchestrated the chaos himself. He has spent billions to make people believe that he is actually a good human and some are buying his bluff.
Sheryl Sandberg recently got in big trouble for having investigators look into whether he shorted $FB before going up on a public platform to talk about $FB ethical issues.
" they hired a PR firm to tie Facebook critics to Soros and anti Soros stuff...."
Yes, but what if it's true?
Soros funds many, highly targeted political activities.
It wouldn't be right if people were perpetuating falsehoods about him ... but if he's actively campaigning or supporting an initiative with major $$$, then it's fine if people are informed of that.
Shorting a stock, and then making big, loud, public moral assertions about the company is totally unscrupulous, obviously, because it undermines the 'moral argument' being made.
If that is in fact what is happening then FB has double duty to call it out.
If Soros has actually done that (I don't know that he did), i.e. take a huge position one day and then come out raging the next, it undermines his credibility entirely - he's effectively 'talking his book' and has a huge conflict of interest.
This is why Private Wealth managers are not supposed to hustle the stocks of the companies their firm's Investment Bankers are advising - it's a conflict of interest. That is actually illegal for example.
> Shorting a stock, and then making big, loud, public moral assertions about the company is totally unscrupulous, obviously, because it undermines the 'moral argument' being made.
Only if those assertions are untrue, I'd say.
> This is why Private Wealth managers are not supposed to hustle the stocks of the companies their firm's Investment Bankers are advising - it's a conflict of interest. That is actually illegal for example.
They have a fiduciary duty, don't they? Soros doesn't have one.
Honestly your own posts seem like a disinformation campaign.
Vague phrases like 'fair game' and 'what if its true' and lies like 'they're not allowed to prove it' seem to legitimize anything Facebook did without actually talking about WHAT they did and then you drop truthy goalpost moving tidbits here or there about related... and yet not entirely on point as to Facebook's actual actions.
I'm not sure what that means. Facebook can surely say "hey the PR firm we hired told the truth and here it is", but as far as I know they've chosen not to.
It's certainly true that powerless people don't talk in Davos, and the globalist ideas of Soros are not a secret. Nothing more is really needed to despise him and the rest of the global elite. Speaking against China is nice, but president Trump is one of the pioneers in this category and he was hated for it (chinese money can buy a lot of media influence).
if you have 14 minutes this US MSM 60 minutes spot from 1996 is a good representation of the mistrust a lot of the centre and particularly the right have about Soros
https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo
Since then he is synonymous amongst nationalists with open borders and supposedly funding them
America tends to run so hard from the risk of a Big Brother scenario that they end up smacking into Snow Crash without even realizing it.