スコア社会の到来間近か

TOEICのスコアアップにこだわる人だってスコアが全てではない領域があることは百も承知でしょう。でも、そんな考えすら甘っちょろくてスコアが全ての社会が到来しつつあるかもしれません。

中国では日本よりもはるかにキャシュレス社会が進んでいることは以下のような記事からも伺い知れますね。

現金お断りの店、日本でも　賽銭もキャッシュレスに

Beyond the Finance 金融を超えて

2017/12/19 0:00［有料会員限定］

中国アリババ集団のアリペイは、電子決済サービス「アリペイ（支付宝）」の利用者から集まるビッグデータを、融資の際の信用力の判断やこれまで金融機関が敬遠してきた借り手の開拓などに使っている。今後は日本でもこうした取り組みが活発になりそうだ。

このような信用力がどうなっているのかよくわかる記事が最新号のWiredに載っていました。アリペイでの使用履歴によって各人のクレジットスコアが算定され、それを基に受けられるサービスも変わってくるというのです。スコアの高い人付き合いがあればその人のスコアも上がるというのも生々しいですね。さらに中国政府はsocial creditという概念で日常生活にもスコアを導入しようとしているとか。

MARA HVISTENDAHL

BUSINESS

12.14.1706:00 AM

INSIDE CHINA'S VAST NEW EXPERIMENT IN SOCIAL RANKING

For those with good behavior, Zhima Credit offers perks through cooperation agreements that Ant Financial has signed with hundreds of companies and institutions. Shenzhou Zuche, a car rental company, allows people with credit scores over 650 to rent a car without a deposit. In exchange for this vetting, Shenzhou Zuche shares data, so that if a Zhima Credit user crashes one of the rental company’s cars and refuses to pay up, that detail is fed back into his or her credit score. For a while people with scores over 750 could even skip the security check line at Beijing Capital Airport.

To see if I could do anything to pull my score up, I took a taxi one morning to a chic open-air shopping center outside Shanghai’s city center to meet with Chen Chen, a 30-year-old illustrator. Chen told a mutual friend on WeChat that she had an “excellent” rating on Zhima Credit, and I wanted to ask her counsel. We bought coffee and walked to an outdoor seating area. Chen wore a button-down shirt open over a white T-shirt and skinny jeans. Her hair was bleached to a straw yellow, and a line of sparkly eye shadow was swept under each eye. On Zhima Credit she clocked in at 710, and her background color was a calming sky blue.

She explained how to boost my score. “They will check what kind of friends you have,” she said. “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.” After signing up for Alipay, I sent friend requests to all of my phone contacts. Only six people accepted. One of my new Alipay friends was a man I used to tutor in English and probably my wealthiest friend in Shanghai. He owned several businesses, a fleet of cars, and a spacious villa in a posh neighborhood. But another was my old tailor, who lived with her family in a single room in a dilapidated house, with piles of cloth obscuring the thin windows. Did the tailor’s impact on my score cancel out the businessman’s? And was I dragging both of them down?

信用できない人物と認定されると旅行もまともにできなくなり、ローンも借りれなくなるとか。

Chinese people who have been branded untrustworthy are getting the first glimpse of what a unified system might mean. One day last May, Liu Hu, a 42-year-old journalist, opened a travel app to book a flight. But when he entered his name and national ID number, the app informed him that the transaction wouldn’t go through because he was on the Supreme People’s Court blacklist. This list—literally, the List of Dishonest People—is the same one that is integrated into Zhima Credit. In 2015 Liu had been sued for defamation by the subject of a story he’d written, and a court had ordered him to pay $1,350. He paid the fine, and even photographed the bank transfer slip and messaged the photo to the judge in the case. Perplexed as to why he was still on the list, he contacted the judge and learned that, while transferring his fine, he had entered the wrong account number. He hurried to transfer the money again, following up to make sure the court had received it. This time the judge did not reply.

Although Liu hadn’t signed up for Zhima Credit, the blacklist caught up with him in other ways. He became, effectively, a second-class citizen. He was banned from most forms of travel; he could only book the lowest classes of seat on the slowest trains. He could not buy certain consumer goods or stay at luxury hotels, and he was ineligible for large bank loans. Worse still, the blacklist was public. Liu had already spent a year in jail once before on charges of “fabricating and spreading rumors” after reporting on the shady dealings of a vice-mayor of Chong­qing. The memory of imprisonment left him stoic about this new, more invisible punishment. At least he was still with his wife and daughter.

このあたりの概略について昨年末に雑誌Economistも詳しい記事を書いていました。こうなるとすぐに中国独裁国家という連想になりますが、大きな技術的問題があるのでそんな簡単にいくわけでもなさそうですが。。。

Big data, meet Big Brother

China invents the digital totalitarian state

The worrying implications of its social-credit project

Dec 17th 2016 | BEIJING

So can a vast social-credit system work? The Chinese face two big technical hurdles: the quality of the data and the sensitivity of the instruments to analyse it. Big-data projects everywhere—such as the attempt by Britain’s National Health Service to create a nationwide medical database—have stumbled over the problem of how to prevent incorrect information from fouling the system (this undermined the Suining experiment, too). Problems of bad data would be even more onerous in a country of 1.3bn people. Vast treasuries of data would also give big incentives for cyber-criminals to steal or change information.

How to analyse the data would be equally problematic. The feature of the social-credit system that has attracted the most attention and alarm is the notion of ascribing “credit scores” (points) to social and political activity. Here, the model seems to be America’s marketing industry. Companies work out credit scores that predict people’s patterns of consumption based on things such as job security, health risks and youth delinquency. But errors abound. The World Privacy Forum, a non-profit organisation, says credit scores are based on hundreds of data points with no standards of accuracy, transparency or completeness. As the report concluded, “error rates and false readings become a big issue.” Garbage in, garbage out.

こういう記事を読むと「中国けしから〜ん」となりますが、GoodleやFacebook, Appleあたりがやっていることもこれに近いことなんでしょうね。