Earn a pat on the back, if you don’t mind being tracked
The 16,000 cittadino of Codogno, in northern Italy, are making history because their local authority is introducing a social credit style app, the consiglio has announced. However, the good intentions of the scheme have been neutralised by the manner of its execution. Now it is perceived as an intrusive information gathering regime that forces citizens to surrender their privacy to unknown people at the local council in the hope of winning prizes.
Critics are likening it to a Chinese state surveillance operation. Critics are saying the sinistro development is merely shrouded in the name of ecology, namely through the EcoAttivi app. Suddenly, the promise to “certify virtuous behaviour”, via geo-localisation and QR codes, sounds ominous.
The level of conditioning is relatively minor in this Italian app, according to digital dystopia opponent Reclaim the Net. The tool is being used on a community of roughly 16,000 people and it isn’t the first in Italy. However its critics say this is how all monstrous regimes build, by increments, and this could be the first exercise in a process of tyranny titration. For example, the lessons of this app’s acceptance could be useful to politicians elsewhere to test the waters and see not only the uptake, but also the reaction to this particular way of monitoring people’s behaviour by “grading it.”
The app’s users will be given “points” if they behave a certain, proscribed way in their environmental, cultural and social activities. In exchange for the virtuous behaviour they can be rewarded with discount coupons. Businesses offer these discounts and the municipality will refund the money to those companies.
Social credit system were pioneered in the name of the People’s Republic of China but not by the people, by the state administrators. The free speech movement Reclaim the Net will point out that social credit systems are always marketed with the phrase “there’s nothing to fear if you haven’t done anything wrong” but they are essentially another technology tool for population control, with the levers of power being the ability to condition responses to various rules with awards and punishment.
The EcoAttivi app sounds like an innocuous way to kill two municipal problems with one stone – get people to recycle their tin cans rather than litter the streets and stimulate the local economy. However, it is the surveillance of civilians and automatic ‘social conditioning’ that Reclaim the Net finds dystopian.
“The idea is to train people to adopt certain habits they otherwise may have no interest in or are incompatible with their lifestyles and thus in the long run allow the authorities to benefit from the system,” said Didi Rankovic.
Rankovic admitted that the virtuous behaviour appears be designed to tackle the economic crisis and help people at the same time. The Codogno app seems particularly keen to get people to bike, instead of drive to work. The lesson for European mobile operators aiming to help communities is that people don’t trust authorities that want to put them under surveillance. The reward in this case is not worth the risk. “The intrusiveness of the schemes into personal life used to be considered completely incompatible with those societies,” said Rankovic. Developer’s note: maybe, people could be rewarded without gathering personal information or tracking their movements.