Social Credit Systems

and their abuse...

Social Credit Systems have been around for as long as people have been around. The village elders made decisions based on their ideas of social credit. Anyone lending anything to someone else has to size them up for when the thing will be returned, if ever. People have to form opinions of others based on scant knowledge in many situations.

Its different when monopolies and governments do it, though, and especially if its automated. This isn’t going away. It has to be on a tight leash, brought to heel like a bad robot dog.

There are a lot of examples of automated social credit systems: credit reporting, criminal history reporting, LinkedIn, no fly lists. Those are just some obvious ones.

Social Credit Systems are on the verge of being automated for personal use too. The Solid Project from the W3C bills itself as a privacy protection initiative but is in reality a personal social credit system, which can be extended for use by companies or governments or groups of all kinds.