> When [reporter] Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-social-credit-system-surv...
> Liu had posted information about embezzlement by a local official, Ma Zhengqi, on his personal page on the Weibo social network because he knew that censorship would prevent its publication in the newspaper.
That's why I put it in quotes. "Bad" in this case depends on what a company thinks makes you high-risk or otherwise undesirable as a customer.
In the case of health insurance, it may be when Google or Facebook classifying you as having a sedentary lifestyle. In the case of banks it may be if you take too many trips to Vegas. In the case of the NSA, it may be posting negative things about the current administration. Because it's distributed among many actors, it will be like the existing credit score system - mostly opaque and unaccountable. Good luck convincing an insurance company that Google misclassified your behaviour.
More generally, there's a big difference between "we won't let you do X because we don't trust you" versus "we won't let you do X because we have moral objections to something you've done." China's social credit system takes the latter into account.
Edit: Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of this "the US is no better" discussion every time there's a news story about China's social credit system. The US has some major problems, but conflating the two is a false equivalence. When CNN reporters are banned from flying because the president thinks they're "fake news", we can have this discussion again.
Put another way, there's a reason free speech (as it's defined in the US) applies to the government and not private entities.
China's system is hand-cranked and top-down. The Facebook/Google system has a life of its own that pervades the very foundations of its host.
Facebook/Google/Paypal provide a new vector of boycotting/vigilantism. People with ideologies sufficiently unpopular with the mainstream get targeted for boycotts, which can spread to the rest of their financial and social network. This effect is impossible to separate from society because its an expression of something that's always been part of human society -- shaming and shunning.
The Chinese system is top down, and designed to maintain the Communist Party's hold on power. Every aspect of the system is dictated from the top, so of course it could easily be dismantled or changed.
You're not thinking big enough. Already, even details like mobile location information is leaking into the hands of bounty hunters[1], which means such information is probably easily available to less controversial operations like insurance companies. Wait until a "background check" for housing means asking Facebook if you've ever expressed an interest in smoking.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/08/companies-resell-us-carr...