The god of China’s big data era

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Are we heading towards a nightmarish world where our every action is going to be rewarded or punished by the Government?

An Orwellian characterisation of social credit is the favoured narrative of English-language media and academia. Countless media stories compare the system with Nineteen Eighty-Four or other more contemporary cultural references such as the Netflix series Black Mirror. The underlying depiction of social credit in these instances is of ‘big data meets big brother’: a corporatist state spying on its population, hoarding vast swathes of personal data to be algorithmically synthesised into a single three-digit score that dictates one’s place in society. Punishments such as bans on individuals purchasing tickets for air travel have hit the headlines.

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Adam Knight — ECFR

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I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes.

Everyone is now really looking into how much data these big companies have about you. You will be surprised, to say the least.

With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

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Brian X. Chen — The New York Times

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What I learned when naked pictures of me were leaked online

The sad thing about these privacy breaches is that your pictures and other private information linger on the web forever.

It is hard to describe my feelings in the moment I found out that boys were showing my pictures around my old school. I felt exposed and – a feeling I’ll never forget – disgusted with myself. In the days that followed, I remember feeling so helpless that I could not function. My older sister had to take care of me, reminding me to eat and holding me when I randomly burst into panicked tears. It felt like a break-up, but instead of a broken heart, there was only shattered self-worth.

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Sophia Ankel — The Guardian