According to an
article in the Weekly Standard,
China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the
country “citizenship scores.” The ACLU reported that, “China appears to be
leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data,
social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social
control.”
It
is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’” In the system,
everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is
linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit,
it will also measure political
compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends
who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more
privileges the government will grant you.
Chinese
social media giants like Alibaba and Tencent are participating in administering
this program. This is relevant to each of us as we consider our freedom. Be on
the watch for any such programs that begin to move our country in a similar
direction. If the control of our finances is coupled with the control of our
political beliefs, every freedom we enjoy today could be destroyed. I think we
need to be very vigilant in speaking out against any similar type behavior by
private companies who are collaborating with the government to profile its
citizens. Apple, Inc. just
announced the ban of thousands of smart phone apps that have been secretly
collecting private information. Interestingly,
these apps originated from China. I am sensitive to watching these trends as
the Bible tells that in the end, the Anti-Christ will control who can buy or
sell in the marketplace. We are not there, but the technologies are being
created to make it possible.
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