> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).

This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.

Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.

> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.

This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.

> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.

We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”