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The credit company that went too far. Would you let them invade your privacy?

This article illustrates the impact of the Chinese credit company Sesame Credit and expresses deep concern about its future development and the equality and privacy issues it will bring to Chinese society.

p.hu@tilburguniversity.edu Hu

Published date

18/04/2017 - 17:19

Courses

Online writing and publishing

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Read time

5 minutes

Sesame credit (also known as Zhima credit), a Chinese social credit scoring company, is now scoring people by taking account of people’s social interactions, and is intertwining the financial aspect of life with people’s social aspect of life. This act is creating more inequalities in the society by forcing people to use their apps, confining people’s friend choices, enlarging the gaps among different social classes and the gap between people who have different e-literacies.

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My Story with Sesame Credit Score

Started in the beginning of 2015, Sesame credit is an independent third-party credit information service company that belongs to the same Group Alipay belongs to: Ant Financial Service Group (an affiliate of the Chinese Alibaba Group). Sesame credit is also one of the eight companies that has gained the governmental permission and business license to start its personal credit information service. The way to access one’s Sesame credit is through the Alipay app as they share the same account where one’s ID information is verified. According to Alipay, till the end of 2016, it has 450,000,000 verified accounts (www.chinanews.com). Till 23 March, 2017, using Sesame credit score to gain zero deposit for different services (renting a room/bike/car, living in a hotel/Airbnb, renting a bank power /umbrella) from different companies is available in 381 Chinese cities and around 20 million people have used such services (www.chinanews.com). Last June (2016), I opened the Sesame credit score service. And my Sesame score was 696 at that time as is shown in figure 1.

Back then I did not know much about how Sesame credit works out the scores for everyone and what is the impact of it in my life. I knew my score was quite ok probably because I used the e-wallet Alipay a lot. Sesame credit has the access to my Alipay data which includes all my online shopping records and offline consuming records in Alipay such as hailing taxis and paying for the restaurant bills. (One can also stop Sesame credit accessing his/her Alipay data.) But since last Summer, I have seldom used Alipay (a Chinese e-wallet). The other day when I checked my Sesame credit, I found it was more or less the same as it was in last June as is shown in figure 2Till April 4th, 2017, my Sesame credit score is 698).

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The Aspects Sesame Credit Score Takes into Account

I wonder why the growth of my Sesame credit score is so slow. By looking at figure 3, I found five aspects actually account for the Sesame credit score. They are one’s identity traits, compliance history, credit history, personal network and purchasing preference. Here I am skeptical about personal network, the purchasing preference aspects and identity traits.

The more high credit friends one's has got, the higher one’s Sesame credit could be.

For the former one, personal network, the Sesame credit algorithm is scoring one’s credit by calculating his/her friends' credit scores, which means the more high credit friends one has got, the higher one’s Sesame credit could be. This rule is actually limiting our friend choice online. Besides, people who refuse using Alipay or who do not have e-literacies will get low Sesame credit scores or no Sesame score. I think it is very likely these people will be discriminated and excluded by the larger part of the society. After all, no one wants to make friends with people who have low reputation scores (even it'sa digital one).

The second aspect personal purchasing preference, contains too much shopping data which is deeply connected to privacy issue. Online purchasing preference has nothing to do with one’s trustworthiness. On the contrary, is only good for surveillance.

The personal identitiy traits aspect of scoring also concern people a lot. By giving a single score for everyone also according to these personal traits will definitely enlarge the gap between different social classes. As the higher social class have higher Sesame credit scores, they can continously enjoy more privileges in this digital age, which will create more social inequlities. Though one can also refuse to give out more personal information such as the highest education, job, property and car information, the tempetation of completing them in order to get higher Sesame credit score and share more services is becoming larger.

It should be all of our concern that with the prevalence and development of Sesame credit, people will be forced to use it out of social pressure.

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Right now Sesame credit company is the only credit scoring company in China that connect individuals’ financial records with their social lives, which is dangerous. It should be all of our concern that with the prevalence and development of Sesame credit, people will be forced to use it out of social pressure. Moreover, if one day in the near future it is integreted with the crediting system controled by bank of Chinese (the official credit system for every Chinese citizen), everyone would become the one who only cares about his/her social credit score and lose their genuine attitudes toward life. Since the crediting system is very new in China, not all citizen know how it works. And not all citizen care about the data policies. If we do not care about this and people are allowing the company to do this, eventually, the tragic society depicted in the first episode of Black Mirror season 3 will come to Chinese society soon, "where the Uber-style rating system is extended to every aspect of life (www.thefader.com)" and your likes in social media means everything.