Should we care about our citizen Score?

 

How trustworthy are you? Is it OK to accept you as a “friend”, read your mail? Offer you some credit? Sell you a gun? A book?

There was some heated discussions last year on the Internet about a novel idea emanating from China when two different concepts: The sesame credit score system developed by Alibaba and Tencent, the country's two main providers of social networks and the new Citizen score concept developed by the Government where presented together as a new ominous social control apparatus which in the end proved to be ahead of reality.
Or was it? It may well be that the attractiveness of such a system is such that eventually it will be implemented one way or the other. Worse, it will be fun, efficient and effective at offering what people, companies and the government need. So much so that soon enough it will become ubiquitous in China first and the rest of the world soon after.


So without knowing all the details yet, let's have a look at what it could become, why it may be so powerful and fun and why in the end, in retrospect, it may seem quaint that it wasn't invented earlier.
The idea introduced by Alibaba and Tencent under the name of Sesame Credit score is similar to the better known credit score used in the United States with the score being calculated based on information about hobbies, lifestyle, and expenses while relying on information from your social network to validate, raise or lower your score base on the score of other people. As for Amazon, E-Bay and other Internet sites in Western countries, there are in this system elements (public information) of trust and validation to smoother trade although this goes one step beyond by merging it with the older idea of credit score (private information) to create a number (or score), well defined and easy to grasp.
Conversely, although the idea introduced by the government remains less clear at the moment, it seems broader and more akin in the end to measuring political compliance than anything else. This “Citizen score”, tied to every person national ID number will be introduced on a voluntary basis at first before becoming compulsory in 2020.
By linking the two ideas, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that you could easily build an extraordinarily powerful social control tool and although it does not seems to be the case yet, this is how it was presented in news articles last year to the outrage of the Internet community.
But to understand why the credibility, attractiveness and dangers of such a system are so high. let's forget the political implications for a moment and focus on the technical  and social characteristics.
Over the last 10 years, with the introduction of the I-phone, the amount and quality of interactive data at the personal level has exploded beyond anyone's imagination so much so that creating a personal profile, a complex, expensive and forever incomplete task if there ever was one (provided in the US by specialized companies such as Acxiom and Experian among others) has become ubiquitous. If you have trillions of data including location, transactions, relations, financial, likes and propensities as is the case of Tencent and Alibaba (or Google, Yahoo, Amazon and the likes), you can in fact go extremely far, creating powerful predictive models with amazing capabilities.
But if the data is the fuel and the statistical models are the engine, we have learned that you also need to introduce some flexibility to the system in order not only to adapt but also to evolve and improve over time. This to my opinion is “the” most potent and frightening part of the tool: It doesn't need to be born perfect. It is impossible. In fact it may even be counter-productive. Understanding how to harness the power and intelligence of the people to improve your system is probably one of the greatest and most significant discovery of the early 21 century. It may well be the force which will continue to power the transformation of the Internet as earlier innovations lose their mojo in the coming years. But more than anything, it is what will makes such a system so powerful, eventually.
Now that the product is technically ready, the next step is the market introduction. Here too, we have made great progress in understanding what works and what does not and the Chinese schedule is a textbook case. Start by offering the product as a useful tool (or application) to innovators, who will embrace it heartily while debugging the system, then roll out the “mature” concept to the general population with a heavy dose of gamification to accelerate adoption and generate addiction. Tone down all aspects seen as “negative” and offer conversely incentives (points and rewards) to facilitate adoption.
The reality today is that if the Chinese authorities manage these steps carefully, and there is little doubt that they will, then there can be no obstacle whatsoever to the introduction of such a tool however Orwellian it may appear. Worse, once launched, it seems difficult to avoid its wider spread around the world. What if you need a score to apply for a visa to visit China for example?

What I find so frightening with this concept are not the possible negative applications but the fact that the data, the technology and our knowledge means that it is an idea which time has come. The defense of privacy, in this respect, looks more and more like a slender dam behind which a tumultuous tsunami of data and technology is rising at an exponential rate. When it breaks, the potential for social engineering will be far greater than in the 1930s. This to my opinion, is one of the most potent, non linear change coming our way in the coming years. And that I am afraid may well be a Chinese innovation.