We Already Live in Social Credit, We Just Don't Call It That

> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.

> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.

I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.

On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.

If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.

While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).

The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.

It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.

Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.

The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.

No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.

We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.

> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.

The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.

Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.

This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.

> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.

It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**

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[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.

[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.

the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC

there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons

It's popular because it solves the problem (not ALL problems, but the one they're trying to solve) and it's easy and low-barrier to implement and use.

Well, delivery addresses can be somehow anonymized by the use of PO boxes; names on credit cards, not so much.

use the same phone number, email address or credit card and they know you are the same person, use the same wifi spot or IP address with the same behaviour and they can intimate you are the same.. Even badly written data analysis can do this and a VPN from another country and different username wont convince any system with an ounce of sense.

Instaban. Every. Time.

The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.

But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.

> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.

In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.

Quite a difference.