4 Major Ways China Could Be Rating Its Citizens for Its 'Social Credit System'
China is currently setting up a vast surveillance network, and with around 1.4 billion citizens to cover, it's not going to be an easy task. That's why the Chinese government is heavily leaning on AI and social media to be able to better rank citizens according to their "social credit."
This "social credit system" has been planned out from as early as 2014, and China intends to have everything ready and fully running by 2020, according to the Business Insider. Once set up, participation by Chinese citizens will be mandatory, and their personal social credit score will go up or down depending on records of their behavior.
The exact system for ranking is a secret, for now, but the government states that all these is to enforce the ideals of trust, that "keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful."
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1. Facial Recognition Technology
A BBC reporter recently tried to test a facial recognition system in Guiyang, southwest China, one of the at least 16 areas in China where the technology is in place.
It only took seven minutes for authorities to get to him.
The technology is undeniably effective, even if results could vary from the Chinese government's claims of a 99.8 percent accuracy rate. The tech was even able to spot a suspect out of a 60,000 pop concert earlier this month according to state media, which lead to an arrest.
It had no problems dealing with the lighting conditions of a pop concert, so for daylight jaywalkers, it will have little issues matching their faces to a central police database. Facial recognition cameras installed in several Chinese cities can already display the photos, surnames, and other information of offenders up on massive screens installed next to the road.
2. Special apps that allow the government to monitor phones
Last year, authorities have started to require residents to install JingWang, an app that scans the files on mobile devices.
Xinjiang, a region of western China that's home to a Muslim minority population, was the first to require its residents to install the Android app, according to Motherboard.
3. "Robot Police" units
The first robot police units were installed in airports last year, and they are now seeing increased adoption in other places like train stations and malls.
Some models come "armed" with electrically charged riot control tools, while others are multi-function units that can detect fires, monitor air quality, and clean on top of scanning people's faces.
4. Tracking social media posts
With most of the users in China using apps like Weibo, it's easier than ever for the government to keep tabs on the social media posts of its citizens.
Hours after a young man in Vancouver retweeted an anti-government post from his Weibo account, authorities have already traced the address of his mother in Wuyi, eastern China.
Police told the mother that her son needed to remove the anti-Xi Jinping post immediately. "My social media account is probably under their close monitoring. They will read everything I say... I am probably on their watch list," the man said earlier this March.
