Does anyone know why pia is blocked in the UK ? Page is not opening.
Probably for the simple fact that it's a VPN service...so they blocked it with the "porn filter".
Do they block domains with the keywords "privacy" "private" in them?
In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#42It seems to me that this credit score system--if real--would ultimately be self-defeating, for two reasons.
First, among a cynical and rebellious youth population, a low score would become a prestigious thing, proof of your courage and gutsy attitude, a kind of street cred.
Second, it would limit economic activity. If you cut off millions of people from car loans on the basis of their questionable postings or online affiliations, the ones really hurt will be the banks and car companies. Idiotic, and would lead to many companies disregarding the "credit" scores.
I don't see this as workable, though it does sound like something the government would like to have.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#43This seems to be Alibaba coming up with a credit scoring system for people who don't have banking relationships. Here's more info.[1] The People's Bank of China already has a more traditional credit rating system. But most people in China don't have a credit rating in any form.[2] This seems to be a scheme to get the rest of the population plugged into the system. There's a Government policy document on this "social…
Eww ewww ewww! I never realized it was this bad. You have a funny idea of "worked". This seems like pure evil oppression. Long live freedom of speech. That being said we have a similar thing in the west, like clearance that you need for some government jobs(checks your connections to enemy states, drug use, general untrustworthy behavior). Fortunately, such government jobs isn't too big part of the economy. Ideally w…
Here, instead of permanent records, we just have credit reports and Facebook to preserve everything we ever did for all time.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#44> our credit score is simple... It’s measured from our assets, our income, and if we have bought on credit in the past and managed it well. Having worked in mortgage lending for many years, I'd like to point out that this isn't true. Your score (generated by the big 3 bureaus) does not take income or assets into account, it's based on credit utilization, payment history, and similar factors reported by your existing…
I still believe credit card companies redline communities in America. I have gotten better cc offers in the better--strike better; richer postal codes. I can't prove it though.
One of my biggest mistake was using a credit card. I wish I threw out that first one I received upon graduation.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#45"Such people will also be barred from serving in certain high-status and influential positions, like government official, reporter, CEO, statistician, and similar." For all practical purposes, I don't think this would be so different from what we already have in the West for people like CEOs, government officials, reporters etc. These people seem to be kicked out as soon as they do something politically incorrect. Th…
The CEO of the world's biggest company by market cap. was revealed gay by accident on TV and nothing happened.
Being gay is fine as far as the influencer class is concerned though. Imagine the brouhaha that would have resulted if instead he'd, say, been outed as being opposed to abortion.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mind if powerful people are being questioned. However, there's a difference between questioning someone, and making them lose their job.
So they should be unaccountable?
People should be accountable for their actions, not for expressing an opinion.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#47A similar thing could happen in the west. Some time ago, it was in the news, that Facebook got a patent on credit scoring depending on your friends and social network.
With the wrong (maybe leftist or file-sharing) friends, your credit score could drop in the near future.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#48Did anyone else reading the headline expect some equivalent to "In Soviet Russia ..."?
The article is a bit more informative than I was expecting but I have one quibble. The sentence "In the West, our credit score is simple. It’s our ability to pay." is incorrect. Our credit score is actually our propensity to pay (and ability to pay is just one facet of that propensity). I know plenty of wealthy people with poor credit scores - some because they're poor at managing their money but there are a surprising number who simply want to hold onto their wealth (and don't care how their credit score is affected).
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#49Did anyone else reading the headline expect some equivalent to "In Soviet Russia ..."? The article is a bit more informative than I was expecting but I have one quibble. The sentence "In the West, our credit score is simple. It’s our ability to pay." is incorrect. Our credit score is actually our propensity to pay (and ability to pay is just one facet of that propensity). I know plenty of wealthy people with poor cre…
In the West -- at least in Western Germany -- the credit score is not your ability to pay.
It is, how the score company things, how likely you will pay.
I know, that for example, there street you live in is one factor used in your credit score. When you seldom have credits or the score company has to limited data about you, such information can be decisive.
There are known cases in Germany, where well off people, who also regularly pay their bills got a bad score, just because the score company used some very limited data and statistical guesswork to simply guess a score.
Re: In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions
#50I foresaw this happening when the Snowden leaks broke out, but I am still surprised to see it come so soon. With so much data in their hands, it's not hard to predict that they would want to boil it down to a simple numerical score. Google does it with Page Rank and it decides everything with regard to search engine visibility.
If the gov. took a log of someone's search engine queries, social networking posts, travels (GPS phone location logs), purchases and her list of friends it would be pretty easy to rate this person according to various criteria. They would need to have a dataset of people and their real world actions in order to train a classifier to predict scores for people based on just their digital traces.
I don't know if it would work though, until tested. Maybe there is no correlation between what people post and what they do.
The counterpoint is that people could use this same system to rate their actions before they act. Imagine a plugin that would warn you before you post some opinion on social networks or add someone to your friend list that it would decrease your rating by 10 points(!) Then you could select which actions you want to do and avoid reducing your score. That would make the rating system meaningless.
The same system could be applied to rank people for their support for equality and freedom. It would make it hard for some to pose as freedom lovers when they act in a way that promotes discrimination.
But either way, we will all act like politicians during political campaigns. Everything people would say would be weighed for the purpose of getting what they desire.
And it doesn't stop here. The bubbling effect in Google, FB and other news feeds would be used to select which stories to show in order to manipulate everyone according to someone else's interests. This slowly morphs into a kind of soft dictatorship, where you are controlled without even realizing it. Even if it wouldn't work on each individual, it would work on average.
That's why Facebook has become so important to elections lately. There is no political candidate that can ignore the FB tribe and its effects. It makes or breaks a campaign, and makes Zuck into a kind of huge power broker. But if a state wants to get its way no matter what (doing what China does now), FB would be a small child compared to the real world consequences they could unleash based on scoring.