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Slashdot: Is Silicon Valley Building a Chinese-Style Social Credit System?

Is Silicon Valley Building a Chinese-Style Social Credit System?
Published on September 01, 2019 at 10:10AM
schwit1 shared this thought-provoking article from Fast Company: Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China's social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies. Here are some of the elements of America's growing social credit system. - The New York State Department of Financial Services announced earlier this year that life insurance companies can base premiums on what they find in your social media posts... - Airbnb can disable your account for life for any reason it chooses, and it reserves the right to not tell you the reason... - You can be banned from communications apps, too. For example, you can be banned on WhatsApp if too many other users block you. You can also get banned for sending spam, threatening messages, trying to hack or reverse-engineer the WhatsApp app, or using the service with an unauthorized app... The most disturbing attribute of a social credit system is not that it's invasive, but that it's extralegal. Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it's an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights. Social credit systems are an end-run around the pesky complications of the legal system. Unlike China's government policy, the social credit system emerging in the U.S. is enforced by private companies. If the public objects to how these laws are enforced, it can't elect new rule-makers... If current trends hold, it's possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It's a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy. In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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