The tyranny of algorithms is part of our lives: soon they could rate everything we do

From The Guardian.com (Mar. 5):

For the past couple of years a big story about the future of China has been the focus of both fascination and horror. It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call “social credit”, and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

As China moves into the newly solidified President Xi Jinping era, the basic plan is intended to be in place by 2020. Some of it will apply to businesses and officials, so as to address corruption and tackle such high-profile issues as poor food hygiene. But other elements will be focused on ordinary individuals, so that transgressions such as dodging transport fares and not caring sufficiently for your parents will mean penalties, while living the life of a good citizen will bring benefits and opportunities.

Online behaviour will inevitably be a big part of what is monitored, and algorithms will be key to everything, though there remain doubts about whether something so ambitious will ever come to full fruition. One of the scheme’s basic aims is to use a vast amount of data to create individual ratings, which will decide people’s access – or lack of it – to everything from travel to jobs.

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It would be easy to assume none of this could happen here in the west. But the 21st century is not going to work like that. These days credit reports and scores – put together by agencies whose reach into our lives is mind-boggling – are used to judge job applications, thereby threatening to lock people into financial problems. And in the midst of the great deluge of personal data that comes from our online lives, there is every sign of these methods being massively extended.

Three years ago Facebook patented a system of credit rating that would consider the financial histories of people’s friends. Opaque innovations known as e-scores are used by increasing numbers of companies to target their marketing, while such outfits as the already infamous Cambridge Analytica trawl people’s online activities so as to precisely target political messaging. The tyranny of algorithms is now an inbuilt part of our lives.

These systems are sprawling, often randomly connected, and often beyond logic. But viewed from another angle, they are also the potential constituent parts of comprehensive social credit systems, awaiting the moment at which they will be glued together. That point may yet come, thanks to the ever-expanding reach of the internet. If our phones and debit cards already leave a huge trail of data, the so-called internet of things is now increasing our informational footprint at speed. [read more]