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Shortly after the episodes of the third season of Black Mirror were released in October 2016, we were surprised by the news that a technology very similar to the one proposed in the episode Nosedive was being implemented in China—that is, the so-called social credits, and how each person, based on their social score, would have benefits or setbacks in accessing services ranging from transportation to financing.
Still in its embryonic stage at the time, we have more recently seen examples of content featuring testimonies from Chinese citizens who had difficulty buying an airline ticket due to this score implemented in the national system, just as, last year, a Wired reportrevealed that citizens with low Zhima credits had to pay more to rent a bicycle, a hotel room, or even an umbrella. Although this is a private initiative related to Alibaba, one of the largest companies in China, and they indicate no connection to the government, such an endeavor still follows the plans already envisioned by the Chinese government in 2014.
Given this, the latest issue of The Economist raised the question: has this Asian trend also echoed in the West? With increasingly easy access to personal information, as we already know from the Facebook case, why wouldn't the State also have this same capacity to acquire information about the population?
In China, security cameras with facial recognition have already helped in the arrest of a man who was identified among 50,000 people at a concert. Also there, a journalist who used Twitter to post negative comments about the government had his social credits downgraded. Even after being ordered to post an apology, the government deemed him dishonest, and as a result, he is no longer allowed to buy property, for example. Now, imagine if, here in Brazil, you started having trouble renting an apartment or getting a loan because you shared a meme of Temer on Facebook or WhatsApp?
“Under authoritarian governments like China’s, digital monitoring has turned intense policing into terrifying, omniscient policing. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, the Chinese government has applied artificial intelligence (AI) and mass monitoring to create a 21st-century panopticon and implement total control over millions of Uighurs, a local Muslim minority. In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism. These results are effective, but deeply concerning.” The Economist
Between freedom and oppression, however, there is also a system that seeks citizens' consent, even though this data is very easily collected and widely produced. In the report, The Economist’s editorial team recalls that, at the time of the collapse of East Germany in 1989, Germans were surprised to discover that the Stasi security service had a large number of informants working for them. Today, with a surveillance system that has also undergone a digital revolution, it is our own cell phones, browsers, and sensors that share this information with the government, which the State can collect, interpret, or even hack—for example, to have a successful election campaign on social media.
While Trump allegedly acquired deeper data on Facebook users' behavior to customize his election campaignHere in Brazil, we already have the case of fake profiles and social media bots that heated up debates four years agoin the last elections. According to The Economist, the same technologies that once made it possible to hack the State can now be turned against us, as they have become accessible to the government (and corporations) in a way that was once reserved for small subculture groups.
“Xinjiang is an extremist nightmare made possible by new technologies: racist policing. Fearing insurrection and separatism, Chinese rulers have reinforced totalitarian control techniques—including the mass detention of Uighurs for re-education—with digital technologies. In parts of the province's streets, there are poles with security cameras every 100–200 meters. They record every driver's face and license plate number. Uighurs' cell phones must run government-created spyware. The data associated with their ID documents is not limited to name, gender, and occupation, but also includes details on relatives, fingerprints, blood type, DNA information, criminal history, and ‘trust status.’ All this and more feeds the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) and an artificial intelligence-based system to generate a list of suspects for detention.”
Despite this, it is believed that this type of totalitarianism is very difficult to apply outside of Xinjiang province, since it involves only an identified minority rather than an entire country's population. Nevertheless, this model has still served as inspiration for other States—from Russia to Rwanda and Turkey. But even in so-called liberal governments, such as in the United States, there are already examples of initiatives similar to those in Xinjiang. In some American cities, police have already been using predictive policing software based on historical data. Furthermore, as The Economist report points out, it is not rare to hear stories of American police officers who used confidential databases to dig up compromising information on journalists, ex-girlfriends, and others.
Therefore, how can we find the balance between freedom and security? According to the magazine, we must start by ensuring that the digital world, just like the real world, has spaces where people can have privacy.
“Citizens of liberal democracies do not expect to be investigated without good cause or to have their homes searched without a warrant. Likewise, a cell phone in a person's pocket should be treated like a filing cabinet at home. Just as cabinets can be locked, encryption should not be weakened. A second priority is to limit the extent to which citizens' information is kept, limit the number of people who have access to it, and punish those who use it inappropriately. In 2006, the European Union published a requirement for mobile companies to keep their customers' metadata for only two years. The law was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2014. Misuse of police data should be a criminal offense for which people are punished, not an ‘error’ absolved by a public apology.”
Finally, the publication also points to the monitoring of artificial intelligence use: since the crime prediction systems used by the police are imprecise—as they are only capable of recognizing patterns of theft and robbery rather than murders—it is necessary to set limits on how decisive they are in police action. Facial recognition technology also still produces many “false positives,” just as artificial intelligence has been programmed in a biased way: capable of recognizing patterns in the provided databases, AI ends up highlighting the large number of Black people arrested, and thus, it associates ethnicity with potential crimes in a biased and inaccurate way.
Thus, The Economist concludes the report by saying that surveillance and transparency must be words and concepts that go hand in hand. Just as a bill in California recently proposed that police agencies disclose what surveillance equipment they have been using, what data is being collected, and how it is being used, new consultations must also be held and proposals raised by citizens themselves so as not to be caught off guard when the combination of technology and surveillance gets out of control and turns the national context into an Orwellian scenario.
Some examples of projects that use technology to monitor government decisions and movements:
Beta, the feminist bot
Operação Serenata de Amor
PegaBot
