Recently, the CEO of Rabobank proposed that potential banking customers should have a “reliability certificate”. Else, the bank may no longer be in a position to monitor fraudulent activities, like the recent money laundering cases at their colleague ING. The Dutch Central Bank is interested in this idea. Sources: FD, Volkskrant. Also see Sunday’s blogs.
Rabobank is far from alone with this idea. Facebook is also working on a reliability scoring in order to crack down on trolls and their continuous stream of fake news (see my 23 August 2018 blog). In fact, all publishers face the same dilemma as Facebook. Any legal liability for fake news would force them to introduce reliability scoring (eg, Bloomberg 12 Sept 2018).
The concept of “scoring” is far from new. The American FICO credit score was already developed in 1956. Many companies use customer credit scoring in order to limit the cost of bankruptcies, fraudulent activities, or over-leveraging including the customer’s inability to pay (on a timely basis). Hence, the title of my blog: from credit score to social credit score.
Adding the dimension of reliability to existing credit scores, is a major step in replicating China’s 2020 Social Credit Score System. However, this development is a bottom-up company approach which is unregulated by governments. China uses a top-down approach, regulated by its government (see yesterday’s part 1 of this blog).
The non-interference by Western governments will cause industry segments (eg, banking) to develop their own methods for reliability certificates, or social credit scoring. This will cause conflicting scores. It’s conceivable – and probably even likely – that Big Tech will start offering their own social credit scoring to various industry segments.
Some may argue that privacy concerns could stop this development. In my view, data privacy is an academic topic and even data ownership is likely to follow suit. Big Tech’s reimbursement for giving up our data privacy and/or our data ownership, is further away than ever.
Please also see my blogs on Big Data, data ownership and data privacy (2015), Data ownership and PSD2 (2016), Tipping points: Data ownership (2016), and Facebook, banking & Application Programming Interfaces (2018).
Once Big Tech’s social credit scoring models have become industry standards then governments will (finally) realise that they surrendered control over their populations, unlike China. Governments then face a make-or-buy decision, or an overdue and ugly fight over control of data & information. Governments that buy information from Big Tech will be dependent on Big Tech.
The non-interference of Western governments, in the bottom-up development of social credit scoring by tech companies, will ultimately imply their selling out to Big Tech.
Selling Out (1999) by Tom Lehrer
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2
Selling out (I’d rather call it “compromise”)
Is easy to do (sometimes you have to close your eyes)
It’s not so hard (being rich is no disgrace)
To find a buyer for you (put on your shoes and join the race)
When money talks (it has a very soothing voice)
You’re under its spell (it’s up to you to make the choice)
Ah, but whaddya have when there’s nothing left to sell?
(Before you know it there’ll be nothing left to sell)
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless stated otherwise
0 Comments