Treacherous Sesame

China's social credit scheme will undermine civil liberties

At the World Economic Forum last month, Alibaba’s chief executive officer Jack Ma conducted an “Ask Me Anything” press conference. He dealt smoothly with many tricky questions, but there was one that he avoided. The query related to Sesame Credit, a behavioural grading system run by Ant Financial Services, a subsidiary of Alibaba. Sesame ranks users on their online habits, including shopping habits, surfing habits and posts on social media. Alibaba then uses the Sesame scores to offer discounts and freebies. Where this intrusive scheme starts to tread into seriously treacherous territory, from a civil rights perspective, is that it is said to be the precursor to a state-sponsored system to monitor and grade Chinese citizens.

 

In 2015, Beijing’s “State Council” outlined a “social credit system”, which will establish “laws, regulations and standard systems for social credit.” It was the 31st item in China's 13th Five Year Plan and it will be operational by 2020. Social credit will encompass every Chinese individual’s personal, professional and financial history. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) recommended it because “when people’s behaviour isn’t bound by morality, a system must be used to restrict their actions”.

 

Private sector organisations are being encouraged to put pilots in place. Sesame already claims close to 200 million users and rewards high-scoring users with discounts, waivers of deposits for loans and free sign-up to dating services. Similar systems have been created by other private entrepreneurs. Sesame uses data collected by Alibaba services, including a surfer’s habits and hobbies, the circle of friends, along with normal financial information to compute a final score. Scores range from 350 to 950 points. Even government services, such as applications to travel abroad, say, Singapore, are fast-tracked for users who have 750-plus points. Such systems start with a review of spending patterns to judge financial credit. But they also compile and review postings on social media such as WeChat, tweets and re-tweets on Weibo — Twitter is banned in China but Weibo has similar features — interactions with friends, etc.

 

Once these systems are integrated and become official, the state will award high scores to those who post only approved content and display “patriotic” attitudes. Scores will be reduced for “anti-social” posts. “Good” citizens with high scores will get easier access to services like quicker processing of passport applications, and be more eligible for government jobs. Low scores could, according to CASS, be punished by measures ranging from public censure to “limitation of online conduct”.

 

In essence, the social credit systems will determine if a given user’s views and actions are in line with the state’s value-system. One of Sesame’s directors offered an example of how someone who bought nappies was “more responsible” than somebody who played online games. Given China’s tight control of cyberspace, it may be possible to map every individual’s cyber-activity in detail and to reward or punish them by suspending net-access, placing travel restrictions, or worse. Every private sector player will willy-nilly, cooperate. Algorithms can crunch all that data. Such a social credit system may be useful to monitor officials for corruption, as China claims. But it has terrifying implications for individual rights and destroys any facade of privacy.

 

An analogy with India is interesting. Most democracies have checks and balances such as privacy laws and multiple political formations. India has the latter but not the former. India does not have a similar scheme but monitoring of individual surfing data, in the name of “security” and surveillance — under the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s Netra (or Network Traffic Analysis, a software network developed by India’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) — is widespread. India also has Aadhaar, which is being used indiscriminately. And while social media players such as Facebook are not banned, they are required to provide data to the government on demand. As such, even though India doesn’t have a Sesame Credit-type scheme, there are enough reasons for fast-tracking the legislation on data privacy.