Interesting article. On the one hand, it provides insides into how the project actually worked in china, which I didn't know. That's interesting.

But it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.

It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.

So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.

You're right that the private vs. public is a very important distinction here.

On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.

If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.

While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).

The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.

> The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private.

No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.

We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.

> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.

The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.

Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.

> parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service

Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.

The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.

As others have noted, the bad thing about social credit is that any one particular institution does it - its that the social credit is mandated by unaccountable entities with lopsided amounts of power. It doesn't matter if its a government that's doing it, or a company, or a cabal of companies, or even if it was literally a single person - the undue coercion is the problem.

The relevant freedom is the freedom to opt-out.

It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.

That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough. Similarly, if all the banks dropped you because your shared social credit said "don't do business with this person".

> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.

> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.

>But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar.

I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.

The government staying out of it makes it worse. The companies have so much power over your life without any oversight.

> private <-> private

the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC

there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons

This was similar to my take. What's dystopian about how the Chinese system was/is/was rumored to be was that it was the government doing the tracking and scoring.

> The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.

This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.

> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.

It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**

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[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.

[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.