This has been discussed couple of times earlier too:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788296" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788296</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13201926" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13201926</a>
My mother in law is already paranoid, warning us not to talk about certain topics with her. Scary stuff.<p>I should point out that my MIL is a completely apolitical person who worked in the Chinese government for her entire career, spending most of that time just helping poor people, without a shred of corruption. She has nothing to worry about, doesn't care about politics, and even <i>she's</i> paranoid about this.
Nice thing is you can use this in an offensive manner too.<p>Japanese forums have been raided by Chinese trolls in the past. Now the Japanese just post a statement about Tienanmen square and poof, no more Chinese attendance, as the Great Firewall starts blocking...<p>Interesting times.
If i where a dictator, i would punnish whoever pitched this as a traitor- after all- now you are cut off from all true information, you get the perfect soap opera- no matter how the people feel, until the day the fluffy thunderclouds around you decide its time for a chain reaction.<p>How this could seem to anyone in power a good idea- i will never know.
Is it fair to say this is objectionable mostly due to the government enforcement of one "score" per person?<p>After all, we have a "karma score" here on HN and we think it's great... in part, presumably, because it's opt-in and it doesn't follow you around.<p>Is there a middle ground? As in, an identity service that offers this kind of "trustworthiness score" across services but it's opt-in and you can have as many "identities" as you'd like. You could use a high-trust real-name identity with certain online accounts like banks but also have the ability to use throw-away identities for anonymous browsing and commenting? If such an identity protocol included some kind of cryptographic chain of proof as a way to validate the trustworthiness, it could be quite useful.
Does anyone believe that this is only for citizens? It wouldn't be that hard to extend a score for the rest of the world. Your online profile could very well affect your travel.
Is there a way to check this score somewhere somehow when outside of China? My family in-law is Chinese but I just do not hear anything about this from them.
It will be interesting to see how YC helps with this as their investment and relationship with China deepens.<p>(see: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16919952" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16919952</a>)<p>Update: my account has just been throttled and I cannot make further comments:/
Reminds me of this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs</a><p>Which has a concept of "social score".
Is this really such a bad thing for developing countries ? In India, for instance , powerful people use twitter to call for rape and murder of their opponents regularly and politicians justify rape. These are just a small minority of people -- however they are extra-ordinarily vocal and their "free speech" scares all the decent people.<p>Of course , Social Credit score has no place in western liberal democracies but maybe Social Credit score is not a bad idea for developing countries where ignorant people outnumber educated people ,where depraved medieval traditions still hold sway.