In China, Your Credit Score Is Affected by Your Political Opinions

There is no evidence that the credit score is affected by political opinions, the only quote “Sesame Credit, however, also uses other data to calculate the scores, such as a person’s hobbies, interaction with friends, shopping habits and lifestyle.” says nothing about political opinions, and I can verify there is no related thing on Sesame Credit's website (Chinese is my native language).

Also Sesame Credit is a private company, it is absolutely not equal to China.

This 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 credit system".[3] The Alibaba thing appears to be a trial under that system.

Of course, it's a Government control thing, too. But China already had that - it's called a dangan. In China, many people really did have a Permanent Record. That's not as important as it used to be, because it was employer-maintained, mostly by state employers. With more private employers, it's less of an issue. This new system may become a modernized version of the dangan.

China has a centuries-long history of keeping records on everyone. The old systems worked when there was very limited population mobility and job mobility. Now, with a more flexible workforce, the old system is getting an upgrade.

[1] http://www.chinadailyasia.com/business/2015-06/09/content_15... [2] http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/08/why-there-are-no-credit-... [3] https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan...

I'll support most entities - not only corporations - that put people's rights ahead of government agencies' data cleptocracy.

"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. They don't seem to have much freedom. For example, the CEO of Mozilla who gave like 1000 dollars to some anti-gay cause like 10 years ago, or the CEO of BP who hired gay escorts or John Derbyshire who wrote something unflattering about blacks.

Ok, it's not the government doing it in the West, but the majority mob. But does it really matter whether it's some elitist government or the majority in a democracy doing it?

Even the ones that grossly misrepresent the services they provide?

PIAs marketing straight up exploits people who aren't tech savvy enough to understand that the promises they make are meaningless.