China's behavior monitoring system bars some from travel, purchasing property
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-soci ... e-cameras/
By 2020, China plans to give all its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score based on how they behave. Some with low scores are already being punished if they want to travel. Nearly 11 million Chinese are not allowed to fly and 4 million are barred from trains. Next week, the program will start expanding nationwide.
The government says it is trying to "purify" society by rewarding people who are trustworthy and punishing those who are not, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy. So like the credit scores most Americans have based on how they handle their finances, Chinese citizens are getting a social credit score based on everything from whether they pay their taxes on time to how they cross the street to what they post online.
"It's a good thing," one Chinese woman said. "There should be punishment for people who can't behave."
China's growing network of surveillance cameras makes all of this possible. The country already has an estimated 176 million cameras. It plans to have more than 600 million installed by 2020.
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SenseTime has created smart cameras for the government that can help catch criminals but also track average citizens.
CBS News
"It can recognize more than 4,000 vehicles," SenseTime CEO Xu Li said. SenseTime is one of China's most successful artificial intelligence companies. It has created smart cameras for the government that can help catch criminals but also track average citizens.
"This knows every person, every bike, every car, every bus?" Tracy asked him, watching a monitor.
"We can tell whether it is an adult, a child, male or female," Xu said.
In several big cities in China, including here in Shanghai, the government is even tracking jaywalkers. Cameras record them going through intersections, zero in on their face, and then publicly shame them on nearby video screens.
Ken DeWoskin, who has studied China's economic and political culture for more than three decades, said the way the new scoring system truly works is kept secret and could be easily abused by the government.
"How far into people's daily mundane activities does this go?" Tracy asked him.
"Well, I think that the government and the people running the plan would like it to go as deeply as possible… to determine how to allocate benefits and also how to impact and shape their behavior," DeWoskin said.
There are upsides if the Chinese government considers you "trustworthy." Those people can get discounts on energy bills, better interest rates at banks, and China's largest online dating site reportedly even boosts the profiles of people with good social credit scores.
If you think it's zero, your naivete is both amusing and refreshing in equal amounts.