How to Stay Smart in a Smart World by Gerd Gigerenzer

Author:Gerd Gigerenzer [Gigerenzer, Gerd]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141995052
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Slippery Slope into Social Scoring

Social credit scores with carrots and sticks attached often make the headlines in Western countries, largely because they are seen as incompatible with the Western ideal of a democracy that values freedom and privacy. Yet Western attitudes towards privacy appear to be shifting towards Chinese ones, adapting to what digital technology offers. And it seems to be happening faster than we are willing to recognize. Take Germany, the land of data protection and privacy. In their history, Germans learned the hard way about the value of privacy during the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, regimes that surveilled, controlled and suppressed their citizens. In these eras, shrugging one’s shoulders and saying ‘I have nothing to hide’ would have meant conforming to the injustices of either system. As a reaction to this history, the first article in the German Constitution addresses human dignity.

Given their past, one might think that Germans are united in rejecting surveillance, and particularly a social credit system for behaviour modification. Yet they appear to be shifting their stance. In 2018, only 9 per cent of Germans thought that a social credit system was a good idea for their future.7 By 2019, the figure had already risen to 20 per cent.8 Similar enthusiasm was recorded in Austria, particularly among the political right.9 Even Germans appear to be getting used to the fact that their smartphones, smart TVs and smart cars are already recording their steps – why not get an additional few bonuses from the government for behaving properly?

Credit companies, health insurers, car insurers, Payback, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Apple and everyone who asks you to accept cookies collect data about you. These companies build their own secret profiles of you. This may seem no big deal, because the data are not added up into a single credit score. Now imagine a data broker who collects data from thousands of these sources and creates a profile for every person, which can be used to calculate a social credit score. This is no fantasy; the companies already exist. Data brokers such as Acxiom and Oracle Data Cloud advertise these services, and work on constructing a comprehensive profile for every citizen. In the US, Acxiom has gathered health data on 250 million consumers, including prescriptions, medical history and data from hospitals, labs and health insurers.10 It also includes criminal records, voter records, item-level purchase data across hundreds of thousands of stores and pharmacies and real-time location data from mobile apps and from tens of thousands of sensors physically placed in malls, airports, cinemas and college campuses. Even homebodies are not free on surveillance: Acxiom collects second-by-second TV viewership data and everything else your smart TV records about you. Personal profiles are sold to banks, insurers, credit card issuers, healthcare providers and governments, including your email address, phone number, IP address and postal address. Acxiom claims to have collected data on more than 700 million people worldwide, and up to 3,000 data points for each individual.

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