Why do you need more similarities? The mass data collection completes the system.
If Treasury is using this data to catch people who violate economic sanctions, ok. If the IRS is using this data to catch people who cheat on their taxes, ok. I don't love either of those things, but they are using the data only to do things that have been defined as their job to do for a long time now.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that any of this data is going to be used to penalize people financially/economically for "social infractions", or to penalize people in unrelated ways (like, you missed payments on your credit card so you aren't allowed to ride on a train). If there was, then sure, that's cause for worry.
Can we stop taking isolated incidents and framing them as official policy?
> can we stop taking isolated incidents and framing them as official policy
Which do you actually want? What bad things that might happen because of it, or that list of bad things massively trimmed down to just what the US government publicly sanctions as official policy?
Also, did you read anything else in the article?
In terms of the facts involved, this has nothing to do with China's social credit score. Note that I am strictly talking about the facts involved, not the political fallout and usual bloviating.
Uhh, that's obviously debatable.
I was responding to a very specific claim. It does have to do with China's social credit score in that it is a slide down the slope toward implementing such nonsense in the US.
Irrelevant. Get a targeted warrant, then get limited data.
My main argument is specifically around whether the US is veering towards the implementation of a social credit score (which I think would look like having ones credit score be impacted by social reasons, and having the credit score be more pivotal to various civil liberties like travel). That's the kind of thing I think intense public outrage would shift government behaviors, especially since it's the kind of policy that would impact every single American
the world is much different than it was 30 years ago. I'm sure many would be appalled by the lack of privacy and governmental overreach.
Also, in the current era, the division of the populace, to the point where many actively hate the other side and think they are evil, is the exact conditions where a social credit score could become palatable if you believed the other side would be affected more.
Just look at the current trend of cancel culture. Its not that far of a leap to make that government policy
It is the mandate of the FBI and their job for a long time now to stop those things.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that these hashes would be used to penalize people in other ways, but if there was then sure, that's cause for worry.
/parody
The hypothetical "what if" of how those hashes could be used to penalize people in other ways is FUD. We can think of millions of ways to abuse any system -- but that doesn't mean that people will.
And government would of course never abuse the data it has. We've heard that before. The have, they do and they will keep doing it.
In the US, except in California perhaps, you have no recourse. In the EU, that's a violation of GDPR and various local data protection laws. Elsewhere, unclear.