#crédit_social

China : Totale Kontrolle ? Die Wahrheit über das Sozialkreditpunktesystem
▻https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/china-totale-kontrolle-die-wahrheit-ueber-das-sozialkreditpunktesys
Cet article décrit pouquoi le système de crédit social n’est pas très différent de la surveillance des entreprises et citoyens qui se pratique en France et en Allemagne.

Sa critique systématique devrait commencer par sa description et l’élaboration d’éléments de critique de tout système de surveillance. Cet article propose quelques éléments pour y arriver.

D’un point de vue anarchiste les sociétés capitalistes modernes (dont la Chine) ont établi un système de corruption morale totalitaire défendu par ses sbires humains et robots. Ils agissent dans le cadre d’un système d’exploitation stable garantissant la domination et les richesses des classes au pouvoir.

Leurs efforts ne sauront prévenir des événements comme la Commune de Paris de 1871, la révolution d’octobre, la chute de la dynastie Pahlavi en 1979 ou la dissolution de la république allemande DDR en 1989/1890. Chaque révolution est le résultat des antagonismes propres à la la société en place. Les révolutions populaire ne sont jamais l’oeuvre des révolutionnaires surveillés et persécutés mais le résultat de catastrophes nationales et de mouvement politiques.

Le succès des communistes chinois était possible à cause de l’absence d’état chinois et de l’affaiblissement des leur ennemis pricipaux le Japon et le Guomindang corrompu jusqu’à la moelle. Cette expérience historique est une des raisons pour les idées sur la relation entre l’état, le parti communiste et les citoyens.

Le plus important danger pour les révolutions naissantes n’est pas la surveillance par des institutionnes impuissantes face aux mouvements populaires mais la communication militaire permettant aux élites de commander des interventions armées contre le peuple. La surveillance individuelle n’occupe qu’un rôle tactique soumis aux stratégies. Au centre des stratégies se trouvent le contrôle des ressources matérielles, des armes, de l’idéologie et de la communicationet.

L’obsession de la surveillance est un dada des classes moyennes qui ont besoin d’une explication simple pour le sentiment de danger et de menace qui ne les quitte jamais. Leur positions sont constamment mises en question et par le prolétariat qu"ils exploitent et par les grands capitalistes qui les écrasent par leur puissance économique.

Les petits bourgeois sont favorables à la surveillance des pauvres et défendent leur propre exemption de la surveillance générale sous prétexte du droit à la vie privée et au secret d’affaires. La surveillance chinoise leur fait peur car elle vise leur propre classe.

11.11.2023 von Frank Sieren| 05:02 Uhr - Im Westen missverstanden, in China zur Kontrolle geschätzt. Experten sagen: Das Social-Scoring-System existiert nicht so, wie sich der Westen dies vorstellt.

Wenn vom Sozialkreditsystem in China die Rede ist, schrillen im Westen sofort die Alarmglocken. George Orwell steht in der Tür und beflügelt Fantasien. Doch die chinesische Realität ist komplizierter. In China ist Überwachung allgegenwärtig, und dennoch ist das Sozialkreditsystem nicht das, was viele westliche Beobachter fürchten.

Auch westliche Studien belegen inzwischen: Bei Chinas Sozialkreditsystem geht es größtenteils um die Bewertung der Transparenz von Firmen (70 Prozent), also um eine Art Schufa, kaum jedoch um die politische Kontrolle von Individuen (zehn Prozent). Nun kann man mit großer Berechtigung feststellen, dass auch diese zehn Prozent schon zu viel sind. Richtig ist allerdings auch, dass erstens diese Form der Überwachung eine Ausnahme und nicht die Regel ist, und zweitens, dass auch in Deutschland Individuen unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen überwacht werden, wie im Verfassungsschutzbericht nachzulesen. Allerdings haben die Überwachten sehr viel mehr Rechte als in China.

„Der Westen hat das Sozialpunktesystem falsch verstanden“, fasst die amerikanische MIT Technology Revue, eine der führenden wissenschaftlich basierten Tech-Zeitschriften, die Untersuchungen zusammen. „Das entsetzliche System existiert nicht, und die Zentralregierung scheint auch kein großes Interesse zu haben, es einzuführen.“ Das kann sich jederzeit ändern, dennoch ist es sinnvoll, sich zunächst anzuschauen, was gegenwärtig da ist.

Schamwand an der Ampel? Nicht durchgesetzt

Das Sozialpunktesystem ist im Versuchsstadium stecken geblieben. Es wurde 2014 eingeführt und sollte innerhalb von sechs Jahren aufgebaut sein. Es sollte die Datenspuren, die Menschen und Firmen hinterlassen, daraufhin untersuchen, ob sie verlässlich sind und sich an die Gesetze halten. In Ansätzen wurde auch überlegt, ob man „korrektes“ politisches Verhalten mit Punkten belohnt und Fehlverhalten entsprechend bestraft. Allerdings stand die Regelung der wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen immer im Vordergrund.

So will die chinesische Regierung Wildwüchse in den Bereichen der boomenden Marktwirtschaft bekämpfen, die in Richtung Manchester-Kapitalismus driften. Sie will Unternehmen, Banken und Bürgern damit ein Instrument an die Hand geben, mit dem sich beurteilen lässt, ob der Wirtschaftspartner verlässlich ist. Bevor man ein Geschäft mit einem Unternehmen macht, soll es möglich sein, herauszufinden, ob die Partner seriös sind. Aber auch Konsumenten, die eine Reise buchen, können so überprüfen, ob die Reiseplattform verlässlich ist. Das ist der Vorteil.

Die Nachteile liegen aber auch auf der Hand. Das System, das Transparenz schaffen soll, kann benutzt werden, um herauszufinden, ob jemand politisch konform ist oder nicht. Ein negatives Ranking kann Einschränkungen in allen möglichen Bereichen nach sich ziehen, zum Beispiel Reisemöglichkeiten einschränken. Ein positives die Karriere fördern oder auch nur für eine schnellere Kreditvergabe sorgen. Die Übergänge sind leider fließend.

Über 70 Kleinversuche gab es bisher, bestimmte Aspekte eines solchen Punktesystems im Alltag zu testen, die teils im Sande verlaufen sind. Es wurde an Ampeln eine „Schamwand“ errichtet, für jene, die bei Rot über die Ampel gelaufen sind: Sie wurden über Gesichtserkennung erfasst und ihre Gesichter und Namen groß auf einer Leinwand gezeigt. Durchgesetzt hat sich das nicht.

WeChat-Daten? Ja, zum Geldverdienen

Auch Privatunternehmen unterstützen die Ziele des Staates. Das Sesame-Credit-System von Ant Financial, einer Tochterfirma des von Jack Ma gegründeten Onlinekonzerns Alibaba, ist das bekannteste. Dort wird allerdings – ähnlich wie bei der deutschen Schufa – vor allem die jeweilige Kreditwürdigkeit bewertet. Ein ähnliches System nutzt Tencent Credit, ein Tochterunternehmen von Tencent, dem Gaming- und Social-Media-Konzern aus dem südchinesischen Shenzhen, der WeChat erfunden hat, die umfassendste Social-Media-App weltweit. Auch WeChat ist eine sehr ambivalente Innovation. Die App managt praktisch den gesamten Alltag, aber sie sammelt auch alle Daten, die Menschen dabei erzeugen. Die wiederum können missbraucht werden.

Allerdings interessiert sich Tencent nicht für die politische Überwachung, sondern vor allem dafür, wie man mit den Daten mehr Geld verdienen kann. Und das wiederum stößt dem Staat auf. Er möchte, weil er andere Ziele hat, diese Form der Kontrolle nicht der Privatwirtschaft überlassen.
Riesige Datenmenge von 1,4 Milliarden Menschen

Die Kommunistische Partei möchte nicht nur über diese Daten verfügen. In dem Fall wäre es einfach (und zum Teil geschieht dies ja schon) die Unternehmen zu zwingen, ihre Daten dem Staat zu überlassen. Der Staat will jedoch weitergehen: Er möchte mitentscheiden, wie die Daten erfasst werden und welche Daten das sind. Deshalb sollte ein zentralisiertes System aufgebaut werden.

Doch zunächst passierte wenig. Das lag nicht nur am politischen Willen, sondern auch an technischen Hürden. Die Covid-Apps haben gezeigt, wie schwierig die Umsetzung eines zentralen Überwachungssystems ist. Die Datenmengen sind einfach zu groß. Es wimmelte in China nur so vor regionalen Apps, die meisten davon hielten Belastungen nicht stand. Und die Apps schaffen es nicht, sich zu koordinieren. Das heillose Durcheinander führte dazu, dass man immer wieder auch grundlegende Daten wie Passnummer oder Telefonnummer neu eingeben musste. Was man nie vergessen darf, sobald es um China geht: Die Daten von 1,4 Milliarden Menschen lassen sich nicht so einfach messen und nur sehr aufwendig und teuer verwalten.

Zudem: Auch in China regelt ein der europäischen Datenschutzgrundverordnung sehr ähnliches sogenanntes Datenschutzgesetz, wer wann und wo darauf zugreifen darf. Die Chinesen haben das Gesetz von den Europäern übernommen. Und in Deutschland wiederum finden sich wesentliche Grunddaten über die Bürger im Steuersystem.

Sozialkreditsystem: Ziele falsch eingeschätzt

Im Dezember vergangenen Jahres wurde der The National Social Credit Information Basic Catalog aktualisiert. Doch darin geht es nur um Maßnahmen zur Förderung des Konsums und der wirtschaftlichen Aktivität. Je mehr die Marktteilnehmer sich gegenseitig trauen könnten, desto aktiver sind sie, so die zentrale These, und desto besser für die chinesische Wirtschaft. „Es hat sich nicht viel geändert“, sagt Jeremy Daum, der an der Yale University chinesisches Recht lehrt. Es gehe vor allem um Kreditwürdigkeit und Sozialverhalten, um Umweltschutz, Korruptionsabwehr, irreführende Werbung, Produktpiraterie oder um Krankenhäuser, die die Versicherung betrogen haben. Davon betroffen seien also vornehmlich Institutionen und Unternehmen.

Zu elf Themen sollen Daten gesammelt werden, darunter grundlegende Personaldaten wie die Passnummer, die in China ein ganzes Leben gleich bleibt und um die sich alles dreht, dann die Strafregistereinträge, verwaltungstechnische Einträge, Lizenzen, Bußgelder, Auszeichnungen, Inspektionsergebnisse. Aber auch professionelle Informationen wie akademische oder technische Titel, Qualifikationen, Informationen, ob die Unternehmen vertrauenswürdig sind und nicht schon auf schwarzen Listen stehen.

Die britische Beratungsfirma Dezan Shira & Associates – sie gehört der Devonshire-Ellis-Industriellenfamilie, die im Schiffsbau (Queen Mary, Britannica) groß geworden ist – hat 20 Büros in Asien, darunter auch in China. Sie stellt fest: „Das Social Credit System wird von ausländischen Beobachtern missverstanden. Seine Ziele werden falsch eingeschätzt, seine Möglichkeiten überschätzt.“ Die Systeme, die benutzt würden, seien sehr unübersichtlich, weil sie nicht einheitlich geregelt sind, sondern „nicht nur von Provinz zu Provinz, sondern sogar von Stadt zu Stadt variieren“.

Die chinesische Regierung ist zwar dabei, die Systeme zu vereinheitlichen. Dennoch fasst auch die MIT Technology Revue zusammen: „Es gibt kein zentrales Kreditpunktesystem für Individuen“ und „die chinesische Regierung hat nie davon gesprochen, dass sie ein solches System anstrebt“. Das Ergebnis der sonstigen Datenerfassung sei im Übrigen für jeden Chinesen transparent auf der Plattform Credit China einzusehen.

Im Frühjahr dieses Jahres hat die Regierung das Sozialkreditsystem auch auf den akademischen Bereich ausgeweitet. Wer abschreibt, Wissen klaut oder sich sonst mit fremden Federn schmückt, muss mit Strafpunkten rechnen.

Dass die Etablierung eines nationalen Social-Credit-Systems nicht vorankommt, liegt nicht etwa daran, dass es von der Bevölkerung nicht gewollt wäre. Eine repräsentative Studie der Freien Universität Berlin zeigt: 80 Prozent von 2000 überregional befragten Chinesen sind bereit, ihre privaten Daten preiszugeben, damit das soziale und wirtschaftliche Leben stabiler, verlässlicher und risikoärmer wird. Ein erstaunliches Ergebnis: Je gebildeter, desto größer die Zustimmung. Die Nachteile waren den Befragten nicht so wichtig.

Woran liegt das? Die Älteren haben noch das Chaos der Kulturrevolution erlebt, die Jüngeren die Korruption und die Intransparenz während des historisch einmaligen Wirtschaftsbooms. Stabilität ist ihnen derzeit wichtiger als Datenschutz. Aber das muss nicht immer so bleiben. Das Datenschutzbewusstsein wächst, Peking muss sich also mit der Umsetzung beeilen. Gerade weil der Schritt von einer zentralisierten, KI-basierten Schufa zum Orwell’schen Konsumenten ohne politischen Spielraum nur ein kleiner ist, wird die Toleranz der chinesischen Bevölkerung dafür mit den Jahren sicherlich nicht größer. Die Einstellung zum Datenschutz hat also auch mit zeitgeschichtlichen Erfahrungen zu tun. Das gilt nicht nur im Verhältnis Europas zu China, sondern ist auch innerhalb Europas so.

Unter den zehn Städten mit den meisten Überwachungskameras weltweit sind neun chinesische Städte und eine europäische Stadt: London. Die Menschen dort haben nach den vielen Erfahrungen mit dem Terror der IRA und islamistischer Gewalttäter so große Angst vor Terroranschlägen, dass ihnen die Kameras als das kleinere Übel erscheinen. In Berlin wäre das undenkbar. Dort überwiegt die historische Erfahrung der Überwachung im Dritten Reich und in der DDR. Das bedeutet jedoch: Wie die Balance zwischen Überwachung und Datenschutz aussieht, lässt sich nicht für alle Länder oder Großstädte gleich entscheiden.

„Beim Datenschutz in China geht es zunächst einmal nicht so sehr um den generellen Schutz der Privatsphäre, sondern darum, den Konsum sicherer zu machen“, stellt Mathias Schroeder von der Pekinger Kanzlei Ding, Schroeder & Partner fest, die auf Mergers & Acquisitions und Investitionsrecht spezialisiert ist. Schroeder wurde in den 1970er-Jahren als Drilling in Peking geboren, seine Eltern waren zu der Zeit dort ostdeutsche Diplomaten. Der Datenschutz werde von Konsumenten getrieben, die Angst hätten, beim Einkaufen oder bei Geschäften generell über den Tisch gezogen zu werden, fasst Schroeder den Trend zusammen.

Datenschutzgesetz? Ja, aber der Staat darf alles

Beim Datenschutz ist die Besorgnis der Chinesen so groß, dass China 2021 das europäische Datenschutzgesetz weitgehend übernimmt. Das Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) mit siebzig Paragrafen hat sich fast völlig an der Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (General Data Protection Regulation) der EU orientiert. Die Definition von „persönlichen Daten“ und „Verarbeitung“ sind im chinesischen Gesetzentwurf fast genauso weit ausgelegt wie im europäischen. Dazu gehört zum Beispiel auch, dass Organisationen und Personen, die mit chinesischen Daten arbeiten, ebenfalls unter dieses Gesetz fallen.

Das chinesische Gesetz schützt allerdings eher davor, dass Firmen Missbrauch mit Daten betreiben. Dafür sind harte Strafen vorgesehen, die bis zu 7,4 Millionen US-Dollar reichen oder gar einem Abzug in Höhe von fünf Prozent des unternehmerischen Jahresgewinns. Der Staat hingegen darf noch alles. Allerdings ist damit der Datenschutzgeist aus der Flasche. Es wird spannend sein, wie sich das wachsende Datenschutzbewusstsein der Chinesen auf der einen Seite und der zunehmende Kontrollwunsch in der Kommunistischen Partei vereinbaren lassen.

Frank Sieren ist einer der führenden deutschen China-Kenner. Er berichtet seit 1994 aus Peking und ist damit der deutsche Journalist, der am längsten in China lebt. Sein jüngstes Buch „China to Go – 100 innovative Trends und erhellende Einblicke“ erschien 2023 im Penguin Verlag, 320 Seiten, 24 Euro. Sie können sich über Linkedin mit ihm vernetzen und ihn so kontaktieren.

#Chine #crédit_social #surveillance #capitalisme #exploitation #révolution

Postes Canada recueille illégalement des renseignements personnels et les loue La Presse canadienne à Ottawa

Le commissaire à la protection de la vie privée affirme que Postes Canada enfreint la loi en glanant des informations sur des enveloppes et des colis dans le but de dresser des listes d’envoi qu’elle loue à des entreprises.

Le bureau de Philippe Dufresne affirme que les informations recueillies pour ce programme de « listes de marketing » comprennent des données sur l’endroit où vivent les individus et le type d’achats en ligne qu’ils effectuent, en fonction du destinateur des colis.

https://www.protegez-vous.ca/var/protegez_vous/storage/images/_aliases/social_network_image/3/0/3/3/3843303-2-fre-CA/postes-canada.jpg

Or, le commissaire a constaté que Postes Canada n’avait pas obtenu l’autorisation des Canadiens pour recueillir indirectement de tels renseignements personnels.

Dans un rapport sur l’enquête de son bureau à Postes Canada, M. Dufresne affirme que cette pratique constitue une violation de l’article 5 de la Loi sur la protection des renseignements personnels.

Le commissaire a recommandé à Postes Canada de cesser d’utiliser et de divulguer les renseignements personnels de cette manière jusqu’à ce que la société d’État puisse demander et obtenir le consentement des Canadiens.

Mais le commissaire Dufresne affirme que Postes Canada a refusé de prendre cette mesure corrective et il l’exhorte à reconsidérer sa décision.

#surveillance #flicage #Société #poste #informations_personnelles #vie_privée

Source : ▻https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/798445/postes-canada-recueille-illegalement-renseignements-personnels-loue

The AI myth Western lawmakers get wrong | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/29/1063777/the-ai-myth-western-lawmakers-get-wrong

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/social-score2b.jpeg?resize=1200,600

While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban AI-powered social scoring.

As they understand it, social scoring is a practice in which authoritarian governments—specifically China—rank people’s trustworthiness and punish them for undesirable behaviors, such as stealing or not paying back loans. Essentially, it’s seen as a dystopian superscore assigned to each citizen. 

The EU is currently negotiating a new law called the AI Act, which will ban member states, and maybe even private companies, from implementing such a system.

The trouble is, it’s “essentially banning thin air,” says Vincent Brussee, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a German think tank.

Back in 2014, China announced a six-year plan to build a system rewarding actions that build trust in society and penalizing the opposite. Eight years on, it’s only just released a draft law that tries to codify past social credit pilots and guide future implementation. 

There have been some contentious local experiments, such as one in the small city of Rongcheng in 2013, which gave every resident a starting personal credit score of 1,000 that can be increased or decreased by how their actions are judged. People are now able to opt out, and the local government has removed some controversial criteria. 

But these have not gained wider traction elsewhere and do not apply to the entire Chinese population. There is no countrywide, all-seeing social credit system with algorithms that rank people.

As my colleague Zeyi Yang explains, “the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either.” 

What has been implemented is mostly pretty low-tech. It’s a “mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values,” Zeyi writes. 

Kendra Schaefer, a partner at Trivium China, a Beijing-based research consultancy, who compiled a report on the subject for the US government, couldn’t find a single case in which data collection in China led to automated sanctions without human intervention. The South China Morning Post found that in Rongcheng, human “information gatherers” would walk around town and write down people’s misbehavior using a pen and paper. 

The myth originates from a pilot program called Sesame Credit, developed by Chinese tech company Alibaba. This was an attempt to assess people’s creditworthiness using customer data at a time when the majority of Chinese people didn’t have a credit card, says Brussee. The effort became conflated with the social credit system as a whole in what Brussee describes as a “game of Chinese whispers.” And the misunderstanding took on a life of its own. 

The irony is that while US and European politicians depict this as a problem stemming from authoritarian regimes, systems that rank and penalize people are already in place in the West. Algorithms designed to automate decisions are being rolled out en masse and used to deny people housing, jobs, and basic services. 

For example in Amsterdam, authorities have used an algorithm to rank young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods according to their likelihood of becoming a criminal. They claim the aim is to prevent crime and help offer better, more targeted support. 

But in reality, human rights groups argue, it has increased stigmatization and discrimination. The young people who end up on this list face more stops from police, home visits from authorities, and more stringent supervision from school and social workers.

It’s easy to take a stand against a dystopian algorithm that doesn’t really exist. But as lawmakers in both the EU and the US strive to build a shared understanding of AI governance, they would do better to look closer to home. Americans do not even have a federal privacy law that would offer some basic protections against algorithmic decision making. 

There is also a dire need for governments to conduct honest, thorough audits of the way authorities and companies use AI to make decisions about our lives. They might not like what they find—but that makes it all the more crucial for them to look.

#Chine #Crédit_social

China just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it says. | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-announced-a-new-social-credit-law-what-does-it-mean

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/social-score2b.jpeg?resize=1200,600

The West has largely gotten China’s social credit system wrong. But draft legislation introduced in November offers a more accurate picture of the reality.
By Zeyi Yangarchive page
November 22, 2022

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR; GETTY
Tech Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here.

It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. Ever since 2014, when China announced a six-year plan to build a system to reward actions that build trust in society and penalize the opposite, it has been one of the most misunderstood things about China in Western discourse. Now, with new documents released in mid-November, there’s an opportunity to correct the record.

For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an instant image: a Black Mirror–esque web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either. 

Instead, the system that the central government has been slowly working on is a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values—however vague that last goal in particular sounds. There’s no evidence yet that this system has been abused for widespread social control (though it remains possible that it could be wielded to restrict individual rights). 

While local governments have been much more ambitious with their innovative regulations, causing more controversies and public pushback, the countrywide social credit system will still take a long time to materialize. And China is now closer than ever to defining what that system will look like. On November 14, several top government agencies collectively released a draft law on the Establishment of the Social Credit System, the first attempt to systematically codify past experiments on social credit and, theoretically, guide future implementation. 

Yet the draft law still left observers with more questions than answers. 

“This draft doesn’t reflect a major sea change at all,” says Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow of the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center who has been tracking China’s social credit experiment for years. It’s not a meaningful shift in strategy or objective, he says. 

Rather, the law stays close to local rules that Chinese cities like Shanghai have released and enforced in recent years on things like data collection and punishment methods—just giving them a stamp of central approval. It also doesn’t answer lingering questions that scholars have about the limitations of local rules. “This is largely incorporating what has been out there, to the point where it doesn’t really add a whole lot of value,” Daum adds. 

So what is China’s current system actually like? Do people really have social credit scores? Is there any truth to the image of artificial-intelligence-powered social control that dominates Western imagination? 

First of all, what is “social credit”?
When the Chinese government talks about social credit, the term covers two different things: traditional financial creditworthiness and “social creditworthiness,” which draws data from a larger variety of sectors.

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The former is a familiar concept in the West: it documents individuals’ or businesses’ financial history and predicts their ability to pay back future loans. Because the market economy in modern China is much younger, the country lacks a reliable system to look up other people’s and companies’ financial records. Building such a system, aimed to help banks and other market players make business decisions, is an essential and not very controversial mission. Most Chinese policy documents refer to this type of credit with a specific word: “征信” (zhengxin, which some scholars have translated to “credit reporting”).

The latter—“social creditworthiness”—is what raises more eyebrows. Basically, the Chinese government is saying there needs to be a higher level of trust in society, and to nurture that trust, the government is fighting corruption, telecom scams, tax evasion, false advertising, academic plagiarism, product counterfeiting, pollution …almost everything. And not only will individuals and companies be held accountable, but legal institutions and government agencies will as well.

This is where things start to get confusing. The government seems to believe that all these problems are loosely tied to a lack of trust, and that building trust requires a one-size-fits-all solution. So just as financial credit scoring helps assess a person’s creditworthiness, it thinks, some form of “social credit” can help people assess others’ trustworthiness in other respects. 

As a result, so-called “social” credit scoring is often lumped together with financial credit scoring in policy discussions, even though it’s a much younger field with little precedent in other societies. 

What makes it extra confusing is that in practice, local governments have sometimes mixed up these two. So you may see a regulation talking about how non-financial activities will hurt your financial credit, or vice versa. (In just one example, the province of Liaoning said in August that it’s exploring how to reward blood donation in the financial credit system.) 

But on a national level, the country seems to want to keep the two mostly separate, and in fact, the new draft law addresses them with two different sets of rules.

Has the government built a system that is actively regulating these two types of credit?
The short answer is no. Initially, back in 2014, the plan was to have a national system tracking all “social credit” ready by 2020. Now it’s almost 2023, and the long-anticipated legal framework for the system was just released in the November 2022 draft law. 

That said, the government has mostly figured out the financial part. The zhengxin system—first released to the public in 2006 and significantly updated in 2020—is essentially the Chinese equivalent of American credit bureaus’ scoring and is maintained by the country’s central bank. It records the financial history of 1.14 billion Chinese individuals (and gives them credit scores), as well as almost 100 million companies (though it doesn’t give them scores). 

On the social side, however, regulations have been patchy and vague. To date, the national government has built only a system focused on companies, not individuals, which aggregates data on corporate regulation compliance from different government agencies. Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy research at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, has described it in a report for the US government’s US-China Economic and Security Review Commission as “roughly equivalent to the IRS, FBI, EPA, USDA, FDA, HHS, HUD, Department of Energy, Department of Education, and every courthouse, police station, and major utility company in the US sharing regulatory records across a single platform.” The result is openly searchable by any Chinese citizen on a recently built website called Credit China.

But there is some data on people and other types of organizations there, too. The same website also serves as a central portal for over three dozen (sometimes very specific) databases, including lists of individuals who have defaulted on a court judgment, Chinese universities that are legitimate, companies that are approved to build robots, and hospitals found to have conducted insurance fraud. Nevertheless, the curation seems so random that it’s hard to see how people could use the portal as a consistent or comprehensive source of data.

How will a social credit system affect Chinese people’s everyday lives?
The idea is to be both a carrot and a stick. So an individual or company with a good credit record in all regulatory areas should receive preferential treatment when dealing with the government—like being put on a priority list for subsidies. At the same time, individuals or companies with bad credit records will be punished by having their information publicly displayed, and they will be banned from participating in government procurement bids, consuming luxury goods, and leaving the country.

The government published a comprehensive list detailing the permissible punishment measures last year. Some measures are more controversial; for example, individuals who have failed to pay compensation decided by the court are restricted from traveling by plane or sending their children to costly private schools, on the grounds that these constitute luxury consumption. The new draft law upholds a commitment that this list will be updated regularly. 

So is there a centralized social credit score computed for every Chinese citizen?
No. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no central social credit score for individuals. And frankly, the Chinese central government has never talked about wanting one. 

So why do people, particularly in the West, think there is? 
Well, since the central government has given little guidance on how to build a social credit system that works in non-financial areas, even in the latest draft law, it has opened the door for cities and even small towns to experiment with their own solutions. 

As a result, many local governments are introducing pilot programs that seek to define what social credit regulation looks like, and some have become very contentious.

The best example is Rongcheng, a small city with only half a million in population that has implemented probably the most famous social credit scoring system in the world. In 2013, the city started giving every resident a base personal credit score of 1,000 that can be influenced by their good and bad deeds. For example, in a 2016 rule that has since been overhauled, the city decided that “spreading harmful information on WeChat, forums, and blogs” meant subtracting 50 points, while “winning a national-level sports or cultural competition” meant adding 40 points. In one extreme case, one resident lost 950 points in the span of three weeks for repeatedly distributing letters online about a medical dispute.

Such scoring systems have had very limited impact in China, since they have never been elevated to provincial or national levels. But when news of pilot programs like Rongcheng’s spread to the West, it understandably rang an alarm for activist groups and media outlets—some of which mistook it as applicable to the whole population. Prominent figures like George Soros and Mike Pence further amplified that false idea. 

How do we know those pilot programs won’t become official rules for the whole country?
No one can be 100% sure of that, but it’s worth remembering that the Chinese central government has actually been pushing back on local governments’ rogue actions when it comes to social credit regulations. 

In December 2020, China’s state council published a policy guidance responding to reports that local governments were using the social credit system as justification for punishing even trivial actions like jaywalking, recycling incorrectly, and not wearing masks. The guidance asks local governments to punish only behaviors that are already illegal under China’s current legislative system and not expand beyond that. 

“When [many local governments] encountered issues that are hard to regulate through business regulations, they hoped to draw support from solutions involving credits,” said Lian Weiliang, an official at China’s top economic planning authority, at a press conference on December 25, 2020. “These measures are not only incompatible with the rule of law, but also incompatible with the need of building creditworthiness in the long run.” 

And the central government’s pushback seems to have worked. In Rongcheng’s case, the city updated its local regulation on social credit scores and allowed residents to opt out of the scoring program; it also removed some controversial criteria for score changes. 

Is there any advanced technology, like artificial intelligence, involved in the system?
For the most part, no. This is another common myth about China’s social credit system: people imagine that to keep track of over a billion people’s social behaviors, there must be a mighty central algorithm that can collect and process the data.

But that’s not true. Since there is no central system scoring everyone, there’s not even a need for that kind of powerful algorithm. Experts on China’s social credit system say that the entire infrastructure is surprisingly low-tech. While Chinese officials sometimes name-drop technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence when talking about the system, they never talk in detail about how these technologies might be utilized. If you check out the Credit China website, it’s no more than a digitized library of separate databases. 

“There is no known instance in which automated data collection leads to the automated application of sanctions without the intervention of human regulators,” wrote Schaefer in the report. Sometimes the human intervention can be particularly primitive, like the “information gatherers” in Rongcheng, who walk around the village and write down fellow villagers’ good deeds by pen.

Related Story

Who needs democracy when you have data?
Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.
However, as the national system is being built, it does appear there’s the need for some technological element, mostly to pool data among government agencies. If Beijing wants to enable every government agency to make enforcement decisions based on records collected by other government agencies, that requires building a massive infrastructure for storing, exchanging, and processing the data. 

To this end, the latest draft law talks about the need to use “diverse methods such as statistical methods, modeling, and field certification” to conduct credit assessments and combine data from different government agencies. “It gives only the vaguest hint that it’s a little more tech-y,” says Daum.

How are Chinese tech companies involved in this system?
Because the system is so low-tech, the involvement of Chinese tech companies has been peripheral. “Big tech companies and small tech companies … play very different roles, and they take very different strategies,” says Shazeda Ahmed, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, who spent several years in China studying how tech companies are involved in the social credit system.

Smaller companies, contracted by city or provincial governments, largely built the system’s tech infrastructure, like databases and data centers. On the other hand, large tech companies, particularly social platforms, have helped the system spread its message. Alibaba, for instance, helps the courts deliver judgment decisions through the delivery addresses it collects via its massive e-commerce platform. And Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, partnered with a local court in China to publicly shame individuals who defaulted on court judgments. But these tech behemoths aren’t really involved in core functions, like contributing data or compiling credit appraisals.

“They saw it as almost like a civic responsibility or corporate social responsibility: if you broke the law in this way, we will take this data from the Supreme People’s Court, and we will punish you on our platform," says Ahmed.

There are also Chinese companies, like Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Group, that have built private financial credit scoring products. But the result, like Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, is more like a loyalty rewards program, according to several scholars. Since the Sesame Credit score is mostly calculated on the basis of users’ purchase history and lending activities on Alibaba’s own platforms, the score is not reliable enough to be used by external financial institutions and has very limited effect on individuals.

Given all this, should we still be concerned about the implications of building a social credit system in China?
Yes. Even if there isn’t a scary algorithm that scores every citizen, the social credit system can still be problematic.

The Chinese government did emphasize that all social-credit-related punishment has to adhere to existing laws, but laws themselves can be unjust in the first place. “Saying that the system is an extension of the law only means that it is no better or worse than the laws it enforces. As China turns its focus increasingly to people’s social and cultural lives, further regulating the content of entertainment, education, and speech, those rules will also become subject to credit enforcement,” Daum wrote in a 2021 article.

Moreover, “this was always about making people honest to the government, and not necessarily to each other,” says Ahmed. When moral issues like honesty are turned into legal issues, the state ends up having the sole authority in deciding who’s trustworthy. One tactic Chinese courts have used in holding “discredited individuals” accountable is encouraging their friends and family to report their assets in exchange for rewards. “Are you making society more trustworthy by ratting out your neighbor? Or are you building distrust in your very local community?” she asks.

But at the end of the day, the social credit system does not (yet) exemplify abuse of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, and it’s important to evaluate it on the facts. The government is currently seeking public feedback on the November draft document for one month, though there’s no expected date on when it will pass and become law. It could still take years to see the final product of a nationwide social credit system.

#Chine #Crédit_social

Identité numérique : prouve que tu existes
▻https://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?article1685

La Commission européenne prépare son « portefeuille européen d’identité numérique ». Rome et Bologne adoptent le « crédit social numérique » à la chinoise. La digitalisation de l’État et son corollaire, l’identification numérique, progressent dans l’indifférence des Smartiens, à la faveur des phases aigües de la Crise (épidémie, guerre, effondrement écologique). Il aura fallu moins de vingt ans pour que se réalisent nos pires anticipations sur la société de contrainte. Pour les nouveaux venus et les nostalgiques, on a ressorti quelques archives. Te souviens-tu de Libertys ? (Pour lire le texte, ouvrir le document ci-dessous.)

Lire aussi : – Libertys – Carte d’identité électronique : ce n’est pas du canular – Aujourd’hui le nanomonde #10 – Après l’occupation de la CNIL – Au doigt et à l’œil (...)

#Nécrotechnologies
▻https://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/IMG/pdf/prouve_que_tu_existes.pdf

Le système de crédit social chinois : miroir pour l’Occident
▻https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-02969746/document

« Vouloir gouverner le peuple d’un siècle frénétique avec douceur et mansuétude, c’est diriger un cheval impétueux sans cravache ni rênes. »

« Renforcez les lois, alourdissez les supplices, étendez la responsabilité collective afin que toute la lignée soit impliquée par le crime d’un seul de ses membres. Détruisez le pouvoir des dignitaires, enrichissez les pauvres, élevez les humbles, vous éliminerez tous les facteurs de trouble et barrerez la route à la délinquance . Vous pourrez ainsi vous livrer au plaisir, étendu sur un mol oreiller, en toute quiétude, en vous conformant au non-agir. »

« C’est ainsi que la rectification des noms est inséparable d’un contrôle rigoureux des individus par une administration tentaculaire et omniprésente, veillant au respect et à l’exécution des lois. »

HAN FEI, Han Fei-Tse ou Le tao du prince , Présenté et traduit par Jean Lévi, Editions du Seuil, 1999, 555 p.

#crédit_social #Chine #surveillance #réputation #évaluation

Analyse du temps de travail, productivité et bien-être | Microsoft 365
▻https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/microsoft-365/business/workplace-analytics

C’est à pleuruer ce mépris des gens qui gtravaillent, réduits à des statistique sans fondement... qui doit savoir ? Regardez la première vidéo : le patron deus ex machina de l’entrperise, sait tout grâce à Microsoft. Le fascisme rampant à l’intérieur de l’entreprise « en réseau ». Non de nom, là, j’ai la colère qui monte. J’étais passé à côté de ce truc. Quand je pense qu’il y en a qui parlent avec effroi du « crédit social » à la chinoise... mais c’est pareil, ici et maintenant, et on n’en parle pas !!!! Oui, le « modèle chinois du numérique » est en train de s’exporter dans le monde entier. Microsoft doit faire ça pour ne pas être pris de vitesse par les chinois, n’est-ce pas ?

Analyse du temps de travail
Exploitez vos données clés en tirant des enseignements du travail quotidien dans Microsoft 365.
Regardez la vidéo

Harmonisez productivité et bien-être
Microsoft réunit informations et expériences en matière de productivité et de bien-être dans Microsoft Teams pour aider les personnes et les organisations à se développer.

#Microsoft #Crédit_social #Surveillance #Workplace_analytics

Microsoft Workplace Analytics
▻https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/partners/workplaceanalytics

Advisory and consulting
Give your customers unprecedented data-driven insights and analytics services. And apply your expertise to create differentiated consulting solutions that unlock customer value.

Sample practice opportunities

Uncover collaboration patterns that lead to higher revenue and more effective management.
Reduce organizational complexity.
Address wasteful collaboration and meeting cultures.
Enhance process efficiency and effectiveness
Drive cultural transformations.
Inform leadership excellence and development.
Adoption and change management
Use Workplace Analytics to set up, implement, and measure long-term customer adoption, change and transformation initiatives.

Sample practice opportunities

Inform leadership initiatives and development.
Enable salesforce transformations.
Drive diversity and inclusion efforts.
Change meeting and collaboration behaviors.
Develop executive dashboards and reporting systems.
Create and validate effective workspace planning initiatives.
Combining our insights with your solutions and services
Develop new solutions or expand the impact of your current solutions and services using Workplace Analytics insights and data.

Sample practice opportunities

Integrate new data sources to augment behavioral insights from Office 365.
Visualize data with dashboards and reports from Power BI and other reporting tools.
Develop new tools and solutions using Workplace Analytics data.

#Microsoft #Surveillance #Workplace_analytics #Crédit_social

Transform your organization with Microsoft Workplace Analytics - Microsoft 365 Blog
▻https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2017/07/05/transform-your-organization-with-microsoft-workplace-analytics

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/07/Workplace-Analytics-GA-FI.jpg

Mais oui, c’est vrai, c’est pas une fake news, c’est bien sur le site de Microsoft. Le fascisme digital avance...

Today’s post was written by Ryan Fuller, general manager of Workplace Analytics.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics—a powerful new organizational analytics solution—is now generally available as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan.

According to a recent Forrester report, increasing employee productivity is the number one priority for C-level executives in the next year, with 96 percent of respondents citing it as a critical or high imperative. Workplace Analytics provides unprecedented behavioral insights that can be used to improve productivity, workforce effectiveness and employee engagement.
New insights from Office 365

Workplace Analytics taps into Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps, to shine a light on how the organization collaborates and spends time. It turns this digital exhaust—the data that comes naturally from our everyday work—into a set of behavioral metrics that can be used to understand what’s going on in an organization.

Organization level collaboration insights in Workplace Analytics.

Microsoft has enabled Workplace Analytics with built-in privacy and compliance capabilities. Customers own their Office 365 data and decide how to apply insights generated by Workplace Analytics to solve tough business challenges. Workplace Analytics only leverages metadata that is aggregated and de-identified.

Workplace Analytics was designed with the flexibility to address a broad range of strategic and organizational culture-based initiatives. Let’s take a look at a few ways customers are using Workplace Analytics:
Sales productivity

A sales organization in a Fortune 500 company used Workplace Analytics to identify the collaborative patterns of top performers and then scaled those behaviors to the broader sales organization—resulting in a significant increase in sales. Some of these insights were expected, like the amount of time spent with customers. But others were new, like the size of the person’s internal network, which may be an indicator of the salesperson’s ability to get answers and solve customer questions.

Exploring internal network size metrics for the sales organization in Workplace Analytics.
Manager effectiveness

Freddie Mac used Workplace Analytics to drive a cultural change with managers. In looking at how time-usage metrics are related to engagement and retention, they found that the behaviors of managers were pivotal in determining employee engagement and retention. Behaviors, such as 1:1 manager time, level of leadership exposure given to employees and the degree to which work can be distributed evenly across an organization, are measurable through Workplace Analytics.
Space planning

The collaboration insights from Workplace Analytics were used by an organization to partner with its commercial real estate company, CBRE, to do space planning. They analyzed the metadata attached to employee calendar items to calculate the travel time associated with meetings. They found that as a result of the relocation, each employee reduced their travel time to meetings by 46 percent—resulting in a combined total of 100 hours saved per week across all 1,200 employees involved in the move.
Customized queries

Every organization has unique business questions, which is why we’ve included the ability to create custom queries directly within Workplace Analytics. Data analysts can choose from a unique set of collaboration metrics to explore activities and trends within the business, including time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size. Analysts can also create custom queries and filter to aggregated population subsets including regions, roles and functions.

“Workplace Analytics is becoming an essential part of our toolkit,” said Tom Springer, partner at Bain. “It shows us where and how our clients are deploying their scarcest resources: the time, talent and energy of their people. Workplace Analytics consistently yields unique insights into resource allocation, collaboration behaviors and organizational networks. We integrate these insights with broader perspectives on strategy, operating model and results delivery to help our clients organize for maximum productivity.”
Building a digital, data-driven enterprise

At Microsoft, Workplace Analytics has yielded significant insights. “We believe building a true digital, data-driven enterprise requires organizations to empower and connect their people across everything—people, processes, data and systems,” said Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft. “Our HR Business Insights group is using Workplace Analytics across a variety of initiatives—from understanding the behaviors driving increased employee engagement, to identifying the qualities of top-performing managers who are leading Microsoft’s cultural transformation from within. We believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.”
Learn more

Workplace Analytics is available now as an add-on to any Office 365 enterprise plan. Learn more about how enterprise customers can access organizational insights from Workplace Analytics in Office 365.

—Ryan Fuller

#Microsoft #Crédit_social #Workplace_analytics #Surveillance

Microsoft could soon assign each and every Office worker a ’Productivity Score’ - MSPoweruser
▻https://mspoweruser.com/microsofts-workplace-analytics-productivity-score

https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/office-slave.jpg

J’attends les réactions à ce “crédit social” à la chinoise à l’intérieur de l’entreprise. On est où là ?

In July Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Workplace Analytics, a new organizational analytics solution that will provide rich, actionable insights into organization’s communication and collaboration trends to help make more effective business decisions.

Workplace Analytics, which is available as part of Office 365 enterprise plan as an add-on, makes use of Office 365 email and calendar metadata, including to/from data, subject lines and timestamps to create set of behavioural metrics that can be used by the managers to know what’s going on in an organization.

Part of those insights is your Productivity Score, an individualized and personalized number between 1 to 800 which tells managers exactly how productive Microsoft thinks you have been, by analysing your every electronic interaction such as time spent in email, time in meetings, after-hours time and network size.

While Microsoft sold this as a way for managers to prevent burn out, New Republic notes that it is equally likely to be used to “optimise” companies based on an unproven metric.

Their particular concern is that Microsoft will make the micro-surveillance of employees mainstream and an accepted part of the work-life, on the basis of unproven and dubious benefits, which are likely to be hacked by workers doing nonsense “grinding” in place of real productive work, simply to increase their score.

The technology is particularly likely to be employed now so many workers are working from home, out of sight of managers.

Microsoft says they “believe people analytics is a competitive necessity for any HR team.”

#Microsoft #Crédit_social #Surveillance

enaible Named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in the April 2020 Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management: Modernizing the Workplace With AI and Video | Business Wire
▻https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200514005508/en/enaible-Named-Cool-Vendor-Gartner-April-2020

https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20200514005508/en/791750/23/enaible_Logo_withTagline_FullColor.jpg

La surveillance au travail est considérée comme “Cool” par le gartner Group. On avance, on avance...

Company’s AI software provides business leaders with real-time visibility into the productivity of their workforce to help organizations improve profit margins for hours paid

May 14, 2020 09:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time
BOSTON—(BUSINESS WIRE)—enaible, a leading provider of AI-powered productivity solutions, today announced it has been named a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management: Modernizing the Workplace With AI and Video1 report. According to the report, “Artificial intelligence, self-curated video and digital collaboration tools are modernizing the workplace. Application leaders transforming human capital management must promote the adoption of these tools in order to improve productivity and organizational performance.” 1

@enaibleinc named a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s Cool Vendors in HCM: Modernizing the Workplace With #AI and Video report
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As today’s workforce is increasingly remote, the need for business leaders to effectively and accurately measure employee productivity and maximize profit margins has never been greater. According to Gartner, “application leaders responsible for transforming HCM technology should: Use AI tools to analyze, identify and influence how leaders combine a number of the productivity factors to increase team performance.” The report further states, “organizations continually strive to improve productivity and employee performance at lower cost.”

enaible’s AI Productivity Platform provides a standardized productivity score, determines optimal work patterns, and identifies which factors will most positively impact team productivity growth. It helps companies eliminate wasted time to improve productivity and margins across the organization.

enaible’s platform offers the following features and benefits:

enaible Productivity Score: uses an organization’s existing system data (i.e. ERP, CRM, Office 365) to quantify productivity at the company and team level through a combination of capacity utilization, consistency and quality impact.
AI Trigger-Task-Time™: algorithm captures the complexity of individual, nuanced work activities and identifies the unique patterns across different roles, departments and tasks that help each employee use the hours worked, productively.
Leadership Recommender™: provides ongoing support and actionable recommendations for leaders so they can drive day-to-day impact. Rather than providing broad sweeping tips, enaible makes personalized, prioritized recommendations to strengthen their business and encourage workers to thrive, no matter where they are based.
“Poor management costs the U.S. economy nearly $400 billion in lost productivity each year. This is largely because companies don’t have visibility into how their workforce is actually working—enaible makes this visible,” said Dr. Tommy Weir, founder and CEO of enaible. “Our AI helps companies get value from their real-time data by pinpointing areas for improvement, making productivity tangible and customizing recommendations to improve margins and help their workers thrive. We believe that being recognized in the 2020 Gartner Cool Vendors in Human Capital Management: Modernizing the Workplace With AI and Video report is reflective of the changing priority and rethinking around workforce productivity beyond just tracking and monitoring.”

To download the full Gartner Cool Vendors in HCM Report: Modernizing the Workplace With AI and Video, visit ▻http://enaible-7081487.hs-sites.com/enaible-blog-0-0.

To schedule a demo with enaible, please contact demo@enaible.io.

#Travail #Droit_travail #Surveillance #Crédit_social #Productivity_score

This startup is using AI to give workers a “productivity score” | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/04/1002671/startup-ai-workers-productivity-score-bias-machine-learning-busine

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/kate-sade-2zZp12ChxhU-unsplash.jpg?resize=1200,600

Dire qu’il y a des naïfs pour croire que le crédit social est uniquement chinois... surveiller et noter les travailleurs, c’est le nouveau modèle du capitalisme international, en Chine comme ailleurs, en télétravail comme dans les locaux de l’entreprise. Et ça va vite, vite...

In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mind. The upheaval has been accompanied by a reported spike in the use of surveillance software that lets employers track what their employees are doing and how long they spend doing it.

Companies have asked remote workers to install a whole range of such tools. Hubstaff is software that records users’ keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and the websites that they visit. Time Doctor goes further, taking videos of users’ screens. It can also take a picture via webcam every 10 minutes to check that employees are at their computer. And Isaak, a tool made by UK firm Status Today, monitors interactions between employees to identify who collaborates more, combining this data with information from personnel files to identify individuals who are “change-makers.”

Now, one firm wants to take things even further. It is developing machine-learning software to measure how quickly employees complete different tasks and suggest ways to speed them up. The tool also gives each person a productivity score, which managers can use to identify those employees who are most worth retaining—and those who are not.

How you feel about this will depend on how you view the covenant between employer and employee. Is it okay to be spied on by people because they pay you? Do you owe it to your employer to be as productive as possible, above all else?

Critics argue that workplace surveillance undermines trust and damages morale. Workers’ rights groups say that such systems should only be installed after consulting employees. “It can create a massive power imbalance between workers and the management,” says Cori Crider, a UK-based lawyer and cofounder of Foxglove, a nonprofit legal firm that works to stop governments and big companies from misusing technology. “And the workers have less ability to hold management to account.”

Whatever your views, this kind of software is here to stay—in part because remote work is normalizing it. “I think workplace monitoring is going to become mainstream,” says Tommy Weir, CEO of Enaible, the startup based in Boston that is developing the new monitoring software. “In the next six to 12 months it will become so pervasive it disappears.”

Weir thinks most tools on the market don’t go far enough. “Imagine you’re managing somebody and you could stand and watch them all day long, and give them recommendations on how to do their job better,” says Weir. “That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what we’ve built.”

Why the sudden uptick in interest? “Bosses have been seeking to wring every last drop of productivity and labor out of their workers since before computers,” says Crider. “But the granularity of the surveillance now available is like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

It’s no surprise that this level of detail is attractive to employers, especially those looking to keep tabs on a newly remote workforce. But Enaible’s software, which it calls the AI Productivity Platform, goes beyond tracking things like email, Slack, Zoom, or web searches. None of that shows a full picture of what a worker is doing, says Weir⁠—it’s just checking if you are working or not.

Once set up, the software runs in the background all the time, monitoring whatever data trail a company can provide for each of its employees. Using an algorithm called Trigger-Task-Time, the system learns the typical workflow for different workers: what triggers, such as an email or a phone call, lead to what tasks and how long those tasks take to complete.

Once it has learned a typical pattern of behavior for an employee, the software gives that person a “productivity score” between 0 and 100. The AI is agnostic to tasks, says Weir. In theory, workers across a company can still be compared by their scores even if they do different jobs. A productivity score also reflects how your work increases or decreases the productivity of other people on your team. There are obvious limitations to this approach. The system works best with employees who do a lot of repetitive tasks in places like call centers or customer service departments rather than those in more complex or creative roles.

But the idea is that managers can use these scores to see how their employees are getting on, rewarding them if they get quicker at doing their job or checking in with them if performance slips. To help them, Enaible’s software also includes an algorithm called Leadership Recommender, which identifies specific points in an employee’s workflow that could be made more efficient.

#Travail #Surveillance #Droit_travail #Crédit_social #Productivity_score

Covid-19 | Codici salute e crediti sociali. Cosa ci racconta la Cina del futuro
▻https://ilmanifesto.it/covid-codici-salute-e-crediti-sociali-cosa-ci-racconta-la-cina-del-nostr

https://static.ilmanifesto.it/2020/04/lp-11261898.jpg

Il sistema dei crediti sociali e il Covid-19. La «fase due» di Pechino unisce il contact-tracing al sistema dei crediti sociali. L’affidabilità o meno di una persona determinerà il suo «status» civile

[traduction avec deepL]

Que sont les crédits sociaux

Sans Facebook, sans Whatsapp, c’est-à-dire sans concurrents bloqués par le pouvoir politique en Chine, Tencent et Alibaba ont pu s’imposer sur le territoire national (qui reste un immense marché) et renforcer (et souvent diversifier, comme dans le cas de WeChat) leur proposition internationale. C’est aussi pour cette raison qu’en plus du contrôle omniprésent du Parti communiste, les grandes entreprises chinoises de haute technologie vivent une relation de dépendance vis-à-vis des organes de l’État.

Le code de la santé a cependant fini par s’insérer dans un autre système en usage depuis quelque temps en Chine, celui des crédits sociaux. À cet égard, il est bon de clarifier un peu les choses : il n’existe pas encore de système national de crédit social en Chine, car il sera évalué en 2020. Il existe cependant différents types de crédits sociaux qui seront ou sont déjà modifiés en raison du coronavirus.

En fait, il en existe plusieurs : le crédit social appliqué aux entreprises (tant gouvernementales que locales), les listes noires et les listes rouges (toutes deux établies par des organismes gouvernementaux mais également utilisées dans certains cas par des entreprises privées), les projets pilotes dans certaines villes qui testent un véritable score social des habitants et enfin le crédit social de nature spécifiquement financière (déjà utilisé aux États-Unis et dans certains pays européens), appliqué pour la plupart par des entreprises privées.

En pratique, s’il existe un système de crédit social plus convaincant que d’autres, il pourrait être adopté au niveau national, tout comme les différentes expériences pourraient aider le parti à concevoir un système national unique, capable d’intégrer des variantes de différents systèmes déjà expérimentés (en combinant peut-être les scores de la ville et les scores financiers pour déterminer des listes noires complètes).

L’objectif final du Parti communiste est la création d’une gigantesque base de données nationale unique dans laquelle chaque citoyen et chaque entreprise aura un score social déterminé par son propre comportement en termes de fiabilité économique (paiement d’amendes, remboursement de prêts), pénale, administrative (dépendant également de comportements de nature civique tels que le fait de klaxonner, de faire une bonne et diligente collecte séparée, etc.)

Si une personne sera considérée comme fiable, elle aura des avantages, sinon elle aura des inconvénients (par exemple, ne pas pouvoir voyager, sanction qui pose le problème d’une disproportion entre « action non fiable » et sanction conséquente). Il existe également des mécanismes de « recouvrement » des dettes : l’aide aux personnes âgées en est un exemple, l’activité bénévole du Parti, un autre.

En ramenant tout cela à nous, on pourrait dire qu’à travers les systèmes de notation et les mécanismes de gammisation, Pékin est en train de construire son propre système capable d’établir de nouveaux concepts de citoyenneté.

Tout cela peut sembler assez troublant, ou inquiétant, mais même le système de crédit social a des racines anciennes dans la culture chinoise.

J.-C., Confucius s’est fixé comme objectif de coordonner toutes les aspirations présentes dans la société, par une série de règles pour maintenir l’ordre. La morale devient un élément intégral de la nouvelle société : une qualité personnelle intime, en opposition aux symboles de prestige de la noblesse. En pratique, il est devenu l’État de décider de ce qui est moral et de ce qui ne l’est pas, s’arrogeant le droit de l’établir également pour les citoyens.

Et le PCC peut utiliser ce système, retouché ou mis à jour avec les besoins de confinement du Covid-19, pour assurer non seulement le bien-être, mais aussi la « sécurité » de ses citoyens (c’est ainsi que le système de crédits sociaux est compris par la majorité de la population chinoise) et assurer pour lui-même le « maintien de la stabilité », ce qui est le plus important pour le PCC.

#Chine #Crédit_social #Coronavirus

Le monde selon #Xi_Jinping

Depuis 2012, le désormais « président à vie » Xi Jinping a concentré tous les pouvoirs sur sa personne, avec l’obsession de faire de la #Chine la superpuissance du XXIe siècle. Plongée au coeur de son « rêve chinois ».

Derrière son apparente bonhomie se cache un chef redoutable, prêt à tout pour faire de la Chine la première puissance mondiale, d’ici au centenaire de la République populaire, en 2049. En mars dernier, à l’issue de vastes purges, Xi Jinping modifie la Constitution et s’intronise « président à vie ». Une concentration des pouvoirs sans précédent depuis la fin de l’ère maoïste. Né en 1953, ce fils d’un proche de Mao Zedong révoqué pour « complot antiparti » choisit à l’adolescence, en pleine tourmente de la Révolution culturelle, un exil volontaire à la campagne, comme pour racheter la déchéance paternelle. Revendiquant une fidélité aveugle au Parti, il gravira en apparatchik « plus rouge que rouge » tous les degrés du pouvoir.
Depuis son accession au secrétariat général du Parti en 2012, puis à la présidence l’année suivante, les autocritiques d’opposants ont réapparu, par le biais de confessions télévisées. Et on met à l’essai un système de surveillance généralisée censé faire le tri entre les bons et les mauvais citoyens. Inflexible sur le plan intérieur, Xi Jinping s’est donné comme objectif de supplanter l’Occident à la tête d’un nouvel ordre mondial. Son projet des « routes de la soie » a ainsi considérablement étendu le réseau des infrastructures chinoises à l’échelle planétaire. Cet expansionnisme stratégique, jusque-là développé en silence, inquiète de plus en plus l’Europe et les États-Unis.

Impériale revanche
Dans ce portrait très documenté du leader chinois, Sophie Lepault et Romain Franklin donnent un aperçu inédit de sa politique et montrent que l’itinéraire de Xi Jinping a façonné ses choix. De Pékin à Djibouti – l’ancienne colonie française est depuis 2017 la première base militaire chinoise à l’étranger – en passant par la mer de Chine méridionale et l’Australie, les réalisateurs passent au crible les projets et les stratégies d’influence du nouvel homme fort de la planète. Nourrie d’images d’archives et de témoignages (de nombreux experts et de dissidents, mais aussi d’un haut gradé proche du pouvoir), leur enquête montre comment Xi Jinping a donné à la reconquête nationaliste de la grandeur impériale chinoise, projet nourri dès l’origine par la République populaire, une spectaculaire ampleur.

►https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078193-000-A/le-monde-selon-xi-jinping
#biographie #démocratie #trauma #traumatisme #Mao #révolution_culturelle #Terres_Jaunes #exil #Prince_Rouge #nationalisme #rêve_chinois #renaissance_nationale #histoire_nationale #totalitarisme #stabilité #idéologie #anti-corruption #lutte_contre_la_corruption #purge #dictature #investissements_à_l'étranger #prêts #dette #KUKA #ports #droits_humains #Australie #infiltration_chinoise #Nouvelle-Zélande #David_Cameron #Jean-Pierre_Raffarin #matières_premières #capitalisme_autoritaire #Ouïghours #arrestations #répression #censure #liberté_d'expression #défilés_militaires #armée #puissance_militaire #Mer_de_Chine_méridionale #îles_de_Spratleys #liberté_de_la_presse #prisonniers_politiques #Hong_Kong

#Djibouti #base_militaire (de Djibouti)

#Sri_Lanka —> Au Sri Lanka, le #port de #Hambantota est sous contrôle chinois, ceci pour au moins 99 ans (accord signé avec le Sri Lanka qui n’a pas pu rembourser le prêt que la Chine lui a accorder pour construire le port...)
#dépendance
v. aussi :
Comment la Chine a fait main basse sur le Sri Lanka
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/comment-la-chine-fait-main-basse-sur-le-sri-lanka

Histoire semblable pour le #Port_du_Pirée à #Athènes, en #Grèce ou l’#aéroport de #Toulouse, en #France.

#Organisation_de_coopération_de_Shangaï :

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/SCO_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg/langfr-280px-SCO_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg.png

Quelques cartes et images tirées du #film #documentaire.

La #nouvelle_route_de_la_soie et autres investissements chinois dans les infrastructures mondiales de #transport :

https://i.imgur.com/RdHTkIr.png

La #Chinafrique :

https://i.imgur.com/z5FF0Y8.png

Le programme de #surveillance_de_masse :

https://i.imgur.com/KFHsCX5.png https://i.imgur.com/BqCkvjD.png https://i.imgur.com/XjivLqo.png https://i.imgur.com/gIOi809.png https://i.imgur.com/UcYPBRM.png

Outre la surveillance, mise en place d’un programme appelé « #crédit_social » :

Le #Système_de_crédit_social est un projet du gouvernement chinois visant à mettre en place d’ici 2020 un système national de #réputation_des_citoyens. Chacun d’entre eux se voit attribuer une note, échelonnée entre 350 et 950 points, dite « crédit social », fondée sur les données dont dispose le gouvernement à propos de leur statut économique et social. Le système repose sur un outil de surveillance de masse et utilise les technologies d’analyse du #big_data. Il est également utilisé pour noter les entreprises opérant sur le marché chinois.

▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_de_cr%C3%A9dit_social

Voici ce que cela donne :

https://i.imgur.com/AanHz3Q.png https://i.imgur.com/zKtoibG.png

ping @reka

China blacklists millions of people from booking flights as ’social credit’ system introduced

Officials say aim is to make it ‘difficult to move’ for those deemed ‘untrustworthy’.

Millions of Chinese nationals have been blocked from booking flights or trains as Beijing seeks to implement its controversial “#social_credit” system, which allows the government to closely monitor and judge each of its 1.3 billion citizens based on their behaviour and activity.

The system, to be rolled out by 2020, aims to make it “difficult to move” for those deemed “untrustworthy”, according to a detailed plan published by the government this week.

It will be used to reward or punish people and organisations for “trustworthiness” across a range of measures.

A key part of the plan not only involves blacklisting people with low social credibility scores, but also “publicly disclosing the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis”.

The plan stated: “We will improve the credit blacklist system, publicly disclose the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis, and form a pattern of distrust and punishment.”

For those deemed untrustworthy, “everywhere is limited, and it is difficult to move, so that those who violate the law and lose the trust will pay a heavy price”.

The credit system is already being rolled out in some areas and in recent months the Chinese state has blocked millions of people from booking flights and high-speed trains.

According to the state-run news outlet Global Times, as of May this year, the government had blocked 11.14 million people from flights and 4.25 million from taking high-speed train trips.

The state has also begun to clamp down on luxury options: 3 million people are barred from getting business class train tickets, according to Channel News Asia.

The aim, according to Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research centre of the State Council, is to make “discredited people become bankrupt”, he said earlier this year.

The eastern state of Hangzou, southwest of Shanghai, is one area where a social credit system is already in place.

People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished.

Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.

Punishments are not clearly detailed in the government plan, but beyond making travel difficult, are also believed to include slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets.

When plans for the social credit scheme were first announced in 2014, the government said the aim was to “broadly shape a thick atmosphere in the entire society that keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful”.

As well as the introduction in Beijing, the government plans a rapid national rollout. “We will implement a unified system of credit rating codes nationwide,” the country’s latest five-year plan stated.

The move comes as Beijing also faces international scrutiny over its treatment of a Muslim minority group, who have been told to turn themselves in to authorities if they observe practices such as abstention from alcohol.

#Hami city government in the far-western #Xinjiang region said people “poisoned by extremism, terrorism and separatism” would be treated leniently if they surrendered within the next 30 days.

As many as a million Muslim Uighurs are believed to have been rounded up and placed in “re-education” centres, in what China claims is a clampdown on religious extremism.

►https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-social-credit-system-flight-booking-blacklisted-beijing-points-
#Chine #surveillance #contrôle #liberté_de_mouvement #liberté_de_circulation #mobilité #crédit_social #comportement #liste_noire #volontariat #points #don_de_sang #alcool #extrémisme #terrorisme #séparatisme #Ouïghours

via @isskein