Crazy story. This frictionless experience sounds amazing until you hear about the literally unbelievable cost to your personal privacy and potentially your freedom. Wechat is a social media superapp embedded in Chinese society to extreme levels. You can order food, pay taxes, get a taxi and date it’s used to surveil the Chinese public by rewarding them for “good” behaviour and punishing “bad” behaviour like public drunkenness, misdemeanours, traffic violations and falling behind in debt. We did a really nice New York Festivals and IMRO winning short documentary on Futureproof about it (link in comments), but essentially these apps are part of a social credit system which is used in China in a semi-unofficial way to ensure good citizenship. Good credit means better access to loans and services, even potentially higher scores on dating apps. Bad credit means less opportunities and more restrictions. In extreme cases, you may be labelled a “deadbeat” and show up on people’s maps (see below). Reports of notices in small towns naming and shaming citizens have been seen and some citizens have had their rights to travel on public transport like domestic flights and trains taken away. It is a terrifying Orwellian present, not future.
Per Peter W. Liu, Ph.D., and Justin M. Liu from Montmouth University:
“One final striking example of WeChat’s role as an extension of state control is in the introduction of China’s relatively new social credit system. This system is a way for the CCP to monitor, shame, and punish 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, separating the trustworthy from the disobedient. Just like a personal credit score, one’s social credit score can fluctuate depending on good behavior (e.g., paying bills on time) and bad behavior (e.g., smoking in a non-smoking zone), and those with low scores may be placed on blacklists in all aspects of life.23
Tencent and WeChat’s role in this topic of unease is its implementation of a system nicknamed the “Deadbeat Map.” This disturbing application will display the full name, court case number, reason they are deemed untrustworthy, and even partial home addresses of anyone with low social credit scores within a user’s 500-meter radius, with a radar changing colors as the density of “deadbeats” increases or decreases.24 This massive infringement of personal privacy by Western standards aims to enhance the repercussions of the social credit system by shaming the “deadbeats” and encouraging others to “treat those people as subhuman,” effectively making Chinese society a “virtual prison.”25 Without the support of WeChat as a medium, consequences of a low social credit score would obviously still be felt in citizens’ daily lives, but not in the same dimension as being publicly exposed and shunned by everyone within 500 meters”.
Be very, very grateful that you live in the European Union and that it dedicates itself to protecting our privacy and civil rights.
But yeah, the tech behind it is actually pretty cool! 😄
