Three US universities are responding to the coronavirus crisis by creating (irony of all ironies) a Chinese style social credit surveillance system that will ‘score’ people based on their exposure to the virus.
According to a report from Tech site dot.LA, researchers at the University of Southern California, Emory University, and the University of Texas Health Science Center are jointly working on the system after receiving federal grant funding.
Like the Chinese social credit system, the scheme will consist of a mobile app for contact tracing the virus, and promises to track the real-time location and symptoms of individuals to calculate “personal risk scores”.
The score would be used to determine the need “for quarantine and decontamination,” according to the report, with “aggregate risk scores” also assigned to “locations like your neighborhood grocery store.”
The universities hope to have a working mobile app by August, in time for the start of the fall semester.
Welcome to the new normal. Surely the fallout of this system will all be positive.
When the coronavirus vaccine eventually comes along the system will presumably be updated to show who has had it and who hasn’t.
High social credit points for those who have taken it, no travel privileges for those who refuse!
The punishment for such a designation as “discredited entity” is to be barred from traveling by train or plane.
China restricted 2.56 million discredited entities from purchasing plane tickets, and 90,000 entities from buying high-speed rail tickets in July: NDRC #socialcredit pic.twitter.com/4zAwJ7hrBn
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 16, 2019
The system is enforced via facial recognition cameras.
Is this our collective future?
Here’s a dystopian vision of the future: A real announcement I recorded on the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train. (I’ve subtitled it so you can watch in silence.) pic.twitter.com/ZoRWtdcSMy
— James O’Malley (@Psythor) October 29, 2018
Apple and Google announced this year that they are working on a Bluetooth applications that will provide contact tracing of the coronavirus using smartphone location data.
