Title: China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone - The Atlantic
Headings: China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone
Global
China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone

Content: However, a state-run, party-inspired, data-driven monitoring system poses profound questions for the West about the role of private companies in government surveillance. Is it ethical for private companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their data to the government? Alibaba (China’s Amazon) and Tencent (owner of the popular messaging platform WeChat) possess sweeping data on each Chinese citizen that the government would have to mine to calculate scores. Although Chinese companies now are required to assist in government spying while U.S. companies are not, it is possible to imagine Amazon in Alibaba’s position, or Facebook in place of Tencent. While private companies like credit scoring bureaus have always used data to measure consumers’ creditworthiness, in any decent society there must be a clear distinction between private-sector and public-sector scoring mechanisms that could determine access to citizen rights and privileges, without recourse. This planned data-focused social credit system is only one facet of China’s rapidly expanding system of algorithmic surveillance. Another is a sprawling network of technologies, especially surveillance cameras, to monitor people’s physical movements. In 2015, China’s national police force—the Ministry of Public Safety— called for the creation of an “omnipresent, completely connected, always on and fully controllable” national video surveillance network. MPS and other agencies stated that law enforcement should use facial recognition technology in combination with the video cameras to catch lawbreakers. One IHS Markit estimate puts the number of cameras in China at 176 million today, with a plan to have 450 million installed by 2020.