In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech companies granted approval from the People’s Bank of China to develop their own private credit scoring platforms. Zhima Credit appeared in the Alipay app shortly after that. The service tracks your behavior on the app to arrive at a score between 350 and 950, and offers perks and rewards to those with good scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not only whether you repay your bills but also what you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores of your friends. Like Fair and Isaac decades earlier, Ant Financial executives talked publicly about how a data-driven approach would open up the financial system to people who had been locked out, like students and rural Chinese. For the more than 200 million Alipay users who have opted in to Zhima Credit, the sell is clear: Your data will magically open doors for you.

Participating in Zhima Credit is voluntary, and it’s unclear whether or how signing up for it could affect an individual’s rating in the government system. Ant Financial declined to let me interview anyone from the company, but did provide a statement from Hu Tao, the general manager of Zhima Credit. “Zhima Credit is dedicated to creating trust in a commercial setting and independent of any government-initiated social credit system,” the statement reads. “Zhima Credit does not share user scores or underlying data with any third party including the government without the user’s prior consent.”

The service “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go.”
Ant Financial did state, however, in a 2015 press release that the company plans “to help build a social integrity system.” And the company has already cooperated with the Chinese government in one important way: It has integrated a blacklist of more than 6 million people who have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s database. According to Xinhua, the state news agency, this union of big tech and big government has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million defaulters, who opened their Zhima Credit one day to find their scores plunging.

The State Council has signaled that under the national social credit system people will be penalized for the crime of spreading online rumors, among other offenses, and that those deemed “seriously untrustworthy” can expect to receive substandard services. Ant Financial appears to be aiming for a society divided along moral lines as well. As Lucy Peng, the company’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in Ant Financial, Zhima Credit “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com