Imagine this. You turn up at a platform. You ask for a token to your destination. You are then
told that you can't have one. You have failed to pay a parking fine or were spotted crossing
roads away from zebra crossings. As a result, the state has withdrawn your right to travel.
Something like this happened to hundreds of people in China last year. The country is introducing a
new "social credit" system that aims to assign points to people based on their financial history
(as credit reference agencies do in the West) and their recent behavior.
This could include criminal convictions and violations of more widely defined social rules:
a raging feud in the street or remarks on social media.
Hello guys! Welcome back to our channel. Today we will be discussing how the life
of people of China is affected by the surveillance system recently introduced
in their country. Stay tuned till the end of the video for amazing facts about this topic.
Subscribe for a new chapter with a new story every day!
Also, click on the bell icon to turn on the post notifications. Lets begin!
Your "citizen score" applies to you wherever you go. A high score allows you to access
faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to another country if you make political posts online
without a permit or question or contradict the government's official narrative on current events.
For calculating the score, private companies working with your government
constantly monitor vast amounts of your online shopping data and social media.
The moment you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are being monitored:
The government assembles an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed
on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or even jaywalk—algorithms with
facial recognition technology will match the video footage of your face to your picture
in a national Identity database. It won't be long before the police show up at your door.
China has the world's biggest surveillance network; it deploys over half of all
surveillance cameras worldwide. From 2011 to 2019, government procurement
orders for equipment like facial recognition cameras and maintenance services related to
surveillance increased by nearly 1,900%. China's surveillance systems and facial
recognition cameras are now being used to conduct seemingly innocuous tasks,
such as monitoring visitors at tourist sites and conducting security checks at airports, and for
more invasive purposes, like predictive policing and helping carry out repressive policies.
At the same time, a local-level backlash to the new technologies is prompting legislation
that may introduce new data privacy standards in a country with relatively few to speak of.
This society may seem dystopian, but it is not farfetched: It could be China is hardly four or
five years. The country is competing to become the first to introduce a complex system of algorithmic
surveillance. China's communist party-state is building a "citizen score" to incentivize "good"
behavior through innovations in artificial intelligence and storage and data mining
to construct detailed profiles of all citizens. A wide accompanying network of surveillance cameras
will constantly monitor citizens' movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism.
China's evolving facial recognition algorithmic surveillance system will depend on the security
organs of the communist party-state to collect, filter, and analyze huge volumes of data flowing
across the internet. China originally planned to develop a "Golden Shiel" surveillance system
allowing easy access to each citizen's local, national, and regional records,
justifying controls in the name of national security and social stability. This ambitious
project has been mostly confined to a content-filtering Great Firewall,
which restricts foreign internet sites, including Facebook, Google, and The New York Times.
China is already using a "health code" digital system to control the movements of the people and
decide who should go into quarantine. To make mandatory home quarantine, local authorities
have again resorted to technology — and have been open about using surveillance cameras.
A sub-district office of the government in Nanjing, in Jiangsu province of the east,
said it had installed cameras outside the compounds of people under self-quarantine
that help them to monitor the affected people 24 hours a day — an initiative that "helped
reduce personnel expenditures and increased work efficiency,"
according to its February 16 post on Weibo, China's twitter-like platform.
Some seemed to accept the surveillance, although it remains unknown how much backlash against the
initiative is tolerated on the country's closely monitored and censored internet.
There is no official mark on the number of cameras installed to initiate quarantine at home
across China. But the Chaoyang district government in Jilin, a city of approx five million people,
mentioned in a statement that it had installed over 550 cameras as of February 8, last year.
Worldwide, governments have adopted less intrusive technologies to track each and every person
even when they leave their room. In Hong Kong, for example, all international arrivals undergoing
a three-week home quarantine must wear a smart bracelet, which connects to an app on
the smartphone that will alert the authorities if they leave their hotel or apartment rooms.
South Korea uses a similar app that tracks locations with GPS and sends an alert when
people leave quarantine. Poland launched an app that allows people staying at the hotel or any
other place under quarantine to send selfies to inform authorities they're staying home.
While the Government of China has long scrutinized individual citizens
for evidence of disloyalty to the regime, it is only starting to develop widely initiated,
constantly updated, and minute records on each citizen's political persuasions,
associations, comments, and even consumer practice. The newly introduced social credit
system under development will strengthen reams of records from government bureaucracies and private
companies into a single "citizen score" for each citizen of China.
While the system is voluntary, it will be mandatory by 2020.
The planned "citizen credit" score will likely be advanced enough to collect more data than the
fico score of the West, which helps lenders make reliable and fast decisions on whether to extend
financial credit. While the latter tracks whether you've paid back your debts and managed your money
well, experts on China and internet privacy have theorized—based on the huge amounts of
data from online shopping mined by the government without any thought for consumer privacy—that your
Chinese credit score could increase if you buy items the regime likes—like clothes—and
lower if you buy ones it doesn't, like alcohol or video games. Beyond online consumer purchasing,
your involvement in politics could also heavily influence your score:
Posting politically influential opinions without prior permission or even posting the true news
that the Chinese government doesn't want public could result in your rank to dunk.
What is more concerning is that the government will technically have the potential to consider
the behavior of a friend of a Chinese citizen and family in determining his or her score.
Human Rights Commission believes that the company that makes surveillance
cameras has been regulating a system in cooperation with the
Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations.
This organized data-focused social credit system is only one aspect of China's rapidly expanding
algorithmic face detection surveillance system. Another is a stretched-out
network of technologies, especially surveillance cameras, to monitor people's physical movements.
China, at present, has no specific national law to monitor the use of surveillance cameras, but the
devices are already a normal part of public life: they're often there watching when people enter a
shopping mall, cross the street, board a bus, dine in a restaurant or even sit in a school classroom.
China's experiments with digital surveillance create a grave new threat to freedom of expression
on the internet and other human rights in China. Increasingly, citizens will refrain
from any independent or critical expression, fearing that their data will be looked through
or their movements recorded—and punished—by the government. And that is exactly the aim
of the program. Furthermore, what comes out in China will not stay in China. Its authoritarian
technologies have a pattern of diffusing to other authoritarian regimes worldwide.
For this reason—not to mention concern for the hundreds of millions of people in China
whose meager freedom will be further diminished—democracies worldwide
must monitor and denounce this sinister creep toward an Orwellian world.
Is it moral for private companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their
data to the government? What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
Till now, you all would have been wondering how the people of China must have been tolerating
this kind of a change, but now you have an answer to that as well! You can also
share this little information with your friends
and spread the knowledge. We hope the points mentioned above did clear out the confusion.
Don’t forget to comment below your suggestions! Hit the like and subscribe button to stay updated.