You probably have heard about this Orwellian evil social score that the Chinese government devised to spy on the wrongdoings of its people and to even further restrict individual freedom in the Middle Kingdom.

I came across this wonderful and thoughtful podcast (˜45min) that dissects the social score from a Chinese perspective and then decomposes and translates it into a Western culture context. It ressonates well with my view and I can very much recommend it.

The way I like to describe the Chinese social score is that it is actually very much like a Western credit score. A score that measures historic transaction data and spending behavior of an individual, signaling to the market how reliable this person is.

It is not the score per se that should be criticized –if at all– it should be how data on Chinese users is generally derived. Alibaba and WeChat are two dominant Chinese platforms (a bit like Yahoo/AOL portals in the dotcom era) where Chinese users literally do ALL transactions of their daily lives from paying bills, banking, buying online to chatting and sharing content, meaning those two platforms have huge amounts of user data to begin with, from which a score is composed. In fact, Alibaba has data on 90% of ALL Chinese internet users.

The Chinese score can therefore be seen as a more precise or evolution of the Western score, as more data is available to define credit-worthiness of people. Whether it is right that those platforms have so much user data is a different question. From a user’s perspective, it seems at least that Chinese people are much more lenient with their data. The convenience and the comfort they get from those platforms greatly outweigh the privacy of their personal data.