(Thanks to János Tóth).
Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion
,,,Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It’s not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school – or even just your chances of getting a date….:
Read the whole article! Comments are welcome!
This decision making easily brings about reinforcement learning in citizens. Reinforcement learning under a fixed purpose generally bereaves behavioral and intentional flexibility. Too much ordered society without any chaotic components made by such reinforcement learning will dehumanize its members.
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This initiative puts the question of ranking into a quite different perspective. If ranking
a., end up in a single number referring to each and every citizens,
b., is handled and controlled by a central (stately run) institution,
c., is obligatory and
d., the way it is calculated is not transparent and is a secret,
it becomes a dreadful weapon the the hands of the state. A real digital big brother.
However, until ranking happens in a distributed manner, ranking the consumers in different aspect by different ranking scales, and are not aggregated in one overall ranking score, and the calculation of the different scores are public and more or less transparent, and the consumer (citizen) can opt out, well it is an everyday practice already.
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