Social Credit System

The Social Credit System is a system being developed by the Chinese government, aimed to assess and place a score on citizens' and businesses' social and economic reputation. With this standardized system, the Chinese government has been reportedly using it as a basis for punishing blacklisted individuals by denying access to train and plane tickets, and preventing their children from enrolling in certain private schools and universities. Certain information about blacklisted citizens is displayed publicly as a form or public shaming.

Outsourcing Data Tracking

The Chinese government has outsourced pilot projects to 8 different private companies, tasked to track data and issue their own social credit scores on citizens. Of the 8 companies, there is Sesame Credit (Alibaba Corp), Tencent, Baihe, and Didi Chuxing, all owned and operated by major multi-billion dollar Chinese corporations.

Ethical Implications

Loss of Privacy

Sesame, owned by Alibaba, monitors users payments through Alipay and e-commerce purchases. Using this information, Sesame is able to create profiles on the users, and attribute judgements of character, like a degree of responsibility or trustworthiness. Baihe, China's most popular dating app with more than 90 million users, partnered with Sesame to display users' social credit scores on their profiles. The trend of publicly flaunting ones' scores, being strongly encouraged by the government and companies like Baihe, are an effort to guide the public to be more open and honest about private information.

References

https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-tax-blacklist-shames-debtors-2017-12?r=UK