This can't be more ridiculous, whoever wrote this article has no idea what Sesame score is, but I do agree with the author that the totalitarian government in China does have the intentions to associate not political opinions with credit system, they may wants to add morality in to account also.
Sesame score is less than harmless, and to most extent, less than useless. China already has a political rating system it's called 档案(Personal Record File). Actually it has acted a crucial part in Chinese society, individual themselves aren't allowed to access their own file, and records inputs we given by their supervisors. You will have your record with you since elementary school, or even earlier. It was serious in 80s and early 90s where state owns everything, you can imagine how hard for an individual to live back in the old days. Since private firms became the mainstream and acts an important role in the Chinese economic structure, these files are no longer required for private owners. As of today, it's only important if you work for state owned units, but it still works, and alive.
If the totalitarian government wants to make a political evaluation system, they can just make use of 档案, plus minus Internet surveillance data they gathered all the time. There's no need of data from any parts that Alibaba(NASDAQ:BABA) owns, Weibo(NASDAQ:WB) is the most influential social network in China, but a local government/state-owned companies easily take down any information they think inappropriate. They do have have read/write privileges to these information, not to mention other minor ones. As for data mining, not a problem, given the resource they have.
Also they don't need something like a smokescreen, or justification for that, since there's already a similar system working, it's easier to maintain that start a new one.
Sesame is merely a joke in the game of privacy-invasion, or credit scoring. Consumers don't care about their sesame score, since they can't make use of it. The imaginary party they 'are trying to serve' in the article, doesn't need them. Though the Aligroup tried to do some evil, but was too dubious and obvious. Last time they tried really hard to do some evil deeds and do crossed some lines by calling your friends telling them your purchases when you have overdue bills for sometime[1]. Things like such makes people question their capabilities of being evil, also ability to score people's credit correctly.
[1] http://www.zhihu.com/question/35586955 (Chinese)