七 评价：你的生活能得到一个好的信用分数么

当反乌托邦科幻小说变成现实，你的每一个小举动都被评价，谁赢谁输?

On 14 June 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called ‘Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System’. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?

2014年6月14日，国务院发布了《社会信用体系建设规划纲要》。从中国的政策文件来看，这是一件冗长而枯燥的事情，但它包含了一个激进的观点。如果有一个国民信用的分数来评价你是什么样的公民呢?

Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated–what you buy at the store and online, where you are at any given time, who your friends are and how you interact with them, how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games, and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It’s not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram, or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit that can capture your moves and location at any given time. But now imagine a system where all these behaviors are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school–or even just your chances of getting a date.

想象一个世界,你的许多日常活动——你在商店和网上买的东西,在任何给定的时间你的位置,你的朋友们是谁并且你和他们怎们交流，你花多少时间看文章或玩电子游戏,和你支付账单和纳税情况(或逃税记录)。不难想象，因为这些都已经发生了，多亏了谷歌、Facebook 和 Instagram 等数据收集巨头，或者像 Fitbit 等可以随时捕捉你的行踪和位置的健康追踪应用。但是现在想象一个系统，在这个系统中，所有这些行为都被评为正面的或负面的，并根据政府设置的规则被凝练成一个数字。这样就会生成你的公民（信用）评分，它会告诉每个人你是否值得信任。此外，你的评级将与所有人的评级进行公开对比，用来决定你是否有资格申请抵押贷款或工作，你的孩子在哪里上学，或者只是你约会的机会。

A futuristic vision of Big Brother out of control? No, it’s already getting underway in China where the government is developing a system to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. I’m sure George Orwell has rolled over in his grave a couple of times in recent years, but this idea, called the ‘Social Credit System’ (SCS), must have him doing frantic 360-degree turns in his coffin.

“老大哥”失控的未来愿景?不，这已经在中国开始施行了，政府正在开发一个系统来评估其13亿公民的可信程度。我相信近年来乔治·奥威尔(George Orwell)在坟墓里翻来覆去过好几次，但这个被称为“社会信用体系”(SCS)的概念，肯定让他在棺材里疯狂地做360度旋转。

The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance ‘trust’ nationwide and to build a culture of ‘sincerity’. As the policy states, ‘It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.’

中国政府将这一制度描述为衡量和增进全国“信任”、建立“诚信”文化的理想方式。正如该政策所言，它将打造一个公众舆论环境，在这个环境中，保持信任是光荣的。加强政务诚信、商业诚信、社会诚信和司法诚信建设。

Others aren’t so sanguine about its wider purpose. ‘It is very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behaviour and what books people are reading. It’s Amazon’s consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist,’ is how Johan Lagerkvist, a Chinese internet specialist at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, describes the Social Credit System (SCS). Dr Rogier Creemers, a postdoctoral scholar specializing in Chinese law and governance at the Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University, who published a comprehensive translation of the plan, compared it to ‘Yelp reviews with the nanny state watching over your shoulder’.

其他人则对其更广泛的目标不那么乐观。它在深度和范围上都非常有野心，包括审查个人行为和人们正在阅读的书籍。瑞典国际事务研究所(Swedish Institute of International Affairs)中国互联网专家约翰•拉格奎斯特(Johan Lagerkvist)这样描述社会信用体系(SCS):它是带有一种奥威尔式的政治扭曲的亚马逊消费者追踪。莱顿大学范沃伦霍芬研究所(Van Vollenhoven Institute at Leiden University)专门研究中国法律和治理的博士后学者罗吉尔·克里默斯(Rogier Creemers)博士发表了该计划的完整译本。

For now, technically, participating in China’s Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person in China (which includes every company or other entity) will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not. Teachers, scientists, doctors, charity workers, government administrators, members of the judicial system and even sports figures will be under special scrutiny. ‘Big data will become the most important and most powerful driver to accelerate the modernization of governmental governance capacity,’ states the plan.

从技术上讲，目前参与中国公民评分是自愿的。但到2020年，这将是强制性的。在中国，每一个公民和法人(包括每一家公司或其他实体)的行为都会受到评级和排名，不管他们喜欢与否。教师、科学家、医生、慈善工作者、政府管理人员、司法系统成员甚至体育明星都将受到特别审查。《规划》指出，大数据将成为加快政府治理能力现代化最重要、最有力的驱动力。

Prior to the national rollout in 2020, the government is taking a watch-and-learn approach. In this marriage between Communist oversight and capitalist can-do, the government has given a licence to eight private companies to come up with systems and algorithms for social credit scores. Predictably, data giants currently run two of the best-known projects.

在2020年全国推广之前，政府采取的是一种观察和学习的方式。在这场共产主义监督与资本主义“能干”(can-do)的联姻中，政府向 8 家私营企业发放了牌照，允许它们设计社会信用评分的系统和算法。可以预见的是，数据巨头目前运行着两个最知名的项目。

The first is with China Rapid Finance, a partner of the social network behemoth Tencent and developer of the messaging app WeChat with more than 850 million active users. The other is run by the Ant Financial Services Group (AFSG), an affiliate company of Alibaba, and is called Sesame Credit. Ant Financial sells insurance products and provides loans to small- and medium-sized businesses. However, the real star of Ant is AliPay, its payments arm, which people use not only to buy things online but also for restaurants, taxis, school fees, cinema tickets and even to transfer money to each other.

第一个合作伙伴是社交网络巨头腾讯(Tencent)的合作伙伴、即时通讯应用微信的开发者、拥有 8.5 亿活跃用户的中国快速金融(China Rapid Finance)。另一家由阿里巴巴旗下的蚂蚁金服集团(AFSG)运营，名为芝麻信用(Sesame Credit)。蚂蚁金服销售保险产品，并向中小企业提供贷款。然而，蚂蚁金服真正的明星是其支付工具支付宝(AliPay)。人们不仅用支付宝在网上购物，还用它支付餐馆、出租车、学费、电影票，甚至是相互转账。

Sesame Credit has also teamed up with other data-generating platforms, such as Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing company that was Uber’s main competitor in China before it acquired the American company’s Chinese operations in 2016, and Baihe, the country’s largest online matchmaking service. It’s not hard to see how that all adds up to gargantuan amounts of ‘big data’ that Sesame Credit can tap into to assess how people behave and rate them accordingly.

芝麻信用还与其他数据生成平台展开合作，比如叫车公司滴滴出行(Didi Chuxing)和中国最大的在线婚恋服务百合网(Baihe)。2016年，滴滴出行收购了优步的中国业务，此前，滴滴出行是优步在中国的主要竞争对手。不难看出，芝麻信贷可以利用这些海量“大数据”来评估人们的行为，并据此对他们进行评级。

So just how are people rated? Individuals on Sesame Credit are measured by a score ranging between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba does not divulge the ‘complex algorithm’ it uses to calculate the number but they do reveal the five factors taken into account. The first is credit history. For example, does the citizen pay their electricity or phone bill on time? Do they repay their credit card in full? Next is fulfilment capacity, which it defines in its guidelines as ‘a user’s ability to fulfil his or her contract obligations’. The third factor is personal characteristics, which is verifying personal information such as someone’s mobile phone number and address. But it’s the fourth category, behaviour and preferences, where it gets interesting and, some might say, more sinister.

那么人们是如何被评价的呢?芝麻信用的评分范围在 350 到 950 分之间。阿里巴巴没有透露其计算数字所用的“复杂算法”，但透露了其中考虑的五个因素。首先是信用记录。例如，市民是否按时缴纳电费或电话费?他们会全额偿还信用卡吗?其次是履约能力，它在其指导方针中将其定义为“用户履行其合同义务的能力”。第三个因素是个人特征，即验证个人信息，如某人的手机号码和地址。但这是第四个类别，行为和偏好，它很有趣，或者说，更险恶。

Under this system, something as innocuous as a person’s shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of product they buy. ‘Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person,’ says Li Yingyun, Sesame’s technology director. ‘Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility.’ So if a citizen is buying socially approved items, like baby supplies or work shoes, their score rises. But if they’re buying Clash of Clans, Temple Run 2 or any video game, and thus looking like a lazy person, their score takes a negative hit. (I wonder how long it will take to get to the point where the system can judge their behaviour within a game? Maybe they will get a few points for being a ‘nicer’ player by, say, helping another player’s avatar in World of Warcraft.)

在这种制度下，一些无害的东西，比如一个人的购物习惯，也会成为个人特征的衡量方法。阿里巴巴承认，它根据人们购买的产品类型来判断他们（的个人特征）。芝麻信用的技术总监李英云(音)说：“举例来说，每天打 10 个小时电子游戏的人会被认为是一个懒散的人”。“经常买尿布的人可能会被认为是父母——一般而言更有责任感。”因此，如果一个公民购买了社会认可的物品，比如婴儿用品或工作鞋，他们的分数就会上升。但如果他们购买的是《部落冲突》、《神庙逃亡2》或任何电子游戏，他们也会因此看起来像个懒散的人，他们的分数就会受到负面影响。(我想知道系统需要多长时间才能判断他们在游戏中的行为?)或许他们会因为成为一个“更好的”玩家而获得一些分数，比如帮助另一个玩家在魔兽世界中的化身。

So the system not only investigates behaviour–it shapes it. It ‘nudges’ each of those closely monitored citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.

因此，这个系统不仅研究行为——它还塑造行为。它“推动”每一个受到密切监控的公民远离政府不喜欢的交易和行为。

And it’s not just about purchases or pastimes. Friends matter, too. The fifth category is interpersonal relationships. What do their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as ‘positive energy’ online, nice messages about the government or how well the country’s economy is doing, will make your score go up. For anyone who’s read The Circle by Dave Eggers, or seen the film, this might sound nightmarishly familiar. ‘You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else,’ writes Eggers. ‘Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.’

不仅仅是购物或娱乐。朋友也很重要。第五类是人际关系。对于被评估的人，他们选择的线上好友和他们之间的互动说明了什么?在网上分享芝麻信用(Sesame Credit)所称的“正能量”、有关政府或中国经济状况的正面信息，会让你的分数上升。对于任何读过戴夫·埃格斯(Dave Eggers)的《圆圈》(The Circle)，或看过这部电影的人来说，这听起来可能非常熟悉。埃格斯写道:“你和你的同类将会快乐地生活在持续不断的监视之下，永远注视着对方，评论对方，投票，喜欢或不喜欢对方，微笑或皱眉，除此之外什么都不做。” “秘密是谎言。分享是关怀。隐私是盗窃。”

Alibaba is adamant that, currently, anything negative posted on social media does not affect scores (we don’t know if this is true or not because the algorithm is secret). But you can see how this might play out when the government’s own Citizen Score system officially launches in 2020. Even though there is no suggestion yet that any of the eight private companies involved in the ongoing pilot scheme will ultimately be responsible for running the government’s own system, it’s hard to believe that the government will not want to extract the maximum possible amount of data for its SCS from the pilots–particularly Alipay’s Sesame and Tencent’s WeChat. If that happens, and continues as the new normal under the government’s own SCS, it will result in private platforms acting essentially as spy agencies for the government. They may have no choice. ‘Government and big internet companies in China can exploit “big data” together in a way that is unimaginable in the West,’ says Creemers. ‘There are ample reasons to assume that whatever data the Chinese government wants, it can get.’

阿里巴巴坚称，目前社交媒体上的任何负面消息都不会影响分数(我们不知道这是真的还是假的，因为算法是保密的)。但你可以看到，当政府自己的公民评分系统在2020年正式启动时，情况可能会如何。虽然还没有建议,任何参与正在进行的试点计划的八个私营企业最终将负责运行政府自己的系统,很难相信政府不想提取可能是最大的数据量——支付宝的芝麻信用和腾讯微信，用于 SCS 项目。如果这种情况发生，并继续作为政府自己的 SCS 下的新常态，它将导致私人平台基本上充当政府的间谍机构。他们可能别无选择。克里默斯说：“中国政府和大型互联网公司可以一起利用“大数据”，这在西方是不可想象的。有充分的理由认为，无论中国政府想要什么数据，它都能得到。”

Posting dissenting political opinions or links mentioning Tiananmen Square has never been wise in China but now it could directly hurt a citizen’s rating. But here’s the real kicker. The system could have a Kevin Bacon-like connection built in. A person’s own score will depend on what their online friends say and do, beyond their own contact with them. If someone they are connected to online posts a negative comment on, say, the Shanghai stock market collapse (a massive embarrassment to the Chinese regime), their own score will also be dragged down. Talk about guilt by association.

在中国，张贴反对的政治观点或提及天安门广场的链接从来都不是明智的做法，但现在它可能会直接损害公民的评分。但真正的问题是，该系统可以内置类似 Kevin bacon 的连接。一个人的分数将取决于他的网上朋友说了什么，做了什么，而不仅仅是他们自己的联系方式。如果与他们有联系的人在网上发表负面评论，比如，上海股市崩盘(中国政府的一大尴尬)，他们自己的分数也会被拉低。通过关联谈论负罪感。

So why have millions of people already signed up to what amounts to a trial run for a publicly endorsed government surveillance system? There may be darker, unstated reasons–fear of reprisals, for instance, for those who don’t put their hand up–but there’s also a lure, in the form of rewards and ‘special privileges’ for those who show themselves to be ‘trustworthy’ on Sesame Credit.

那么，为什么数以百万计的人已经签署了相当于一个公开认可的政府监控系统的试运行协议呢?可能有些更加黑暗的、没有说明的原因——害怕报复，比如，对那些不参与的人。但也有诱惑，通过奖励和“特权”的形式给予那些在芝麻信用上显示出他们是“值得信任的”人。

If their score reaches 600, they can take out a ‘Just Spend’ loan of up to 5,000 yuan (around $1,000) to use to shop online, as long as it’s on an Alibaba site. Reach 650 points, they may rent a car without leaving a deposit. They are also entitled to faster check-in at hotels and use of the VIP check-in at Beijing Capital International Airport. Those with more than 666 points can get a cash loan of up to 50,000 yuan (more than $10,000), obviously from Ant Financial Services. Get above 700, they can apply for Singapore travel without supporting documents, such as an employee letter. And at 750, they get fast-tracked application to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa. ‘I think the best way to understand the system is as a sort of bastard love child of a loyalty scheme,’ says Rogier Creemers. ‘Like the trust systems on eBay put together with an air-miles-type rewards programme.’

如果他们的评分达到 600 分,只要是在阿里巴巴网站上，他们可以使用“花呗”的额度高达 5000 元(约1000美元)用于网上购物。评分达到 650 分,他们可以免押金租一辆车。他们也有权快速入住酒店和在北京首都国际机场使用 VIP 通道。超过 666 分的学生可以从蚂蚁金服获得最高 5 万元( 1 万美元以上)的现金贷款。如果超过 700 分，他们可以申请去新加坡旅游，不需要任何证明文件，比如员工信。如果达到 750 分，他们能快速申请到梦寐以求的泛欧申根签证。“我认为，理解这个体系的最佳方式是把它当成忠诚计划的私生子，”罗吉尔•克里默斯(Rogier Creemers)说。“就像在 eBay 的信任系统上加上一个 air-miles-type 奖励计划”。

Higher scores have already become a status symbol, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) within months of launch. A citizen’s score can even increase or decrease their odds of getting a date or a marriage partner, because the higher their Sesame rating, the more prominent their dating profile is on Baihe. ‘A person’s appearance is very important… but it’s more important to be able to make a living,’ says Zhuan Yirong, vice president of Baihe. ‘Your partner’s fortune guarantees a comfortable life.’ More than 15 per cent of Baihe users are currently choosing to display prominently their Sesame scores on their profiles. It shows how readily many people will buy into a system like this, apparently blind to all its other implications.

更高的分数已经成为一种身份象征，(芝麻信用）在微博(相当于中国的Twitter)上线后的几个月内，就有近 10 万人在微博上炫耀自己的分数。公民的得分甚至可以增加或减少获得约会或结婚对象的可能性，因为他们的芝麻信用评级越高,他们的交友资料在百合网位置更能优先显示。百合网副总裁庄一荣说，一个人的外表很重要，但更重要的是能够生存。你伴侣的财富保证了他/她过上舒适的生活。超过 15% 的百合用户目前选择突出显示芝麻成绩档案。它显示出许多人是多么容易接受这样一个系统，而明显对它的所有其他影响视而不见。

Sesame Credit already offers tips to help individuals improve their ranking, including warning about the downsides of friending someone who has a low score. Undoubtedly, it won’t be long before we see the rise of score advisors, who will share tips on how to gain points, or reputation consultants willing to offer expert advice on how strategically to improve a ranking or get off the trust-breaking blacklist. I wonder if people will hire reputation auditors to look into the assessments made about them. It could be a lucrative new venture for accounting outfits like PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

芝麻信用已经提供了帮助个人提高排名的建议，包括警告与分数较低的人交朋友的坏处。毫无疑问，用不了多久，我们就会看到分数顾问(score advisors)的崛起，他们会分享如何获得分数的诀窍，或者声誉顾问(reputation consultants)愿意就如何策略性地提高排名或从破坏信任的黑名单上除名提供专家建议。我想知道人们是否会雇佣声誉审计师来调查对他们的评估。对于普华永道这样的会计机构来说，这可能是一个利润丰厚的新项目。

We’re also bound to see the birth of reputation black markets selling under-the-counter ways to boost trustworthiness. In the same way that Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers can be paid for, and positive reviews on the darknet can be bought, individuals will pay to manipulate their score. But what happens to the poor and less educated people who can’t afford or don’t know how to enhance their score? Those who can’t game or manipulate the system will be at a disadvantage. And what about keeping the system secure? Cyber hackers (some even state-backed) could go in and change or steal the digitally stored information. How much will a spouse or a future employee pay to purchase data on everything from the comments made in chatrooms to a history of every hotel room someone has checked into? It will give a whole new meaning to a ‘background check’.

我们还肯定会看到黑市的诞生，通过黑市销售提高可信度的方式。就像Facebook上的“赞”和Twitter上的关注者可以付费，也可以购买暗网上的正面评论一样，个人也会付费来操纵自己的分数。但是，对于那些负担不起或不知道如何提高分数的穷人和受教育程度较低的人来说，情况会怎样呢?那些不能玩弄或操纵这个系统的人将处于不利地位。那保持系统安全方面呢?网络黑客(有些甚至是政府支持的黑客)可以入侵，改变或窃取数字存储的信息。配偶或未来的雇员会花多少钱来购买从聊天室评论到某人入住的每个酒店房间的历史等各种数据?它将赋予“背景调查”一个全新的意义。

There’s a compelling psychological reason people are willing to sign up to systems like this. Sesame Credit has tapped into a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: the desire to push ourselves to be better. We have been ranked and put on a curve since we were in primary school; most of us are wired to want continually to level up, to score higher than others. We’re caught on the ‘hedonic treadmill’, the term psychologists give to the desire to keep improving our current situation. We stay on it because satisfaction and happiness seem forever just out of reach. For instance, when we finally reach a longed-for salary level, we’ll experience a temporary high but before long we are hankering after more money. Or we post something on Facebook and it gets 121 ‘likes’; the pleasure soon gives way to a desire to post something that gets 125 or more ‘likes’. In the world of Citizen Scores, this means as soon as we reach one level, we not only will need but will want to ramp upwards. The desired social rung will always remain tantalizingly out of our grasp, making it almost impossible to be content with who and where we are.

人们愿意注册这样的系统有一个令人信服的心理原因。芝麻信用触及了使我们成为人类的一个基本方面——让自己变得更好的愿望。从小学开始，我们就被评分并且排名；我们大多数人都想要不断地升级，想要比别人得分更高。我们陷入了“享乐跑步机”(hedonic单调乏味的跑步机)，心理学家用这个词来形容不断改善现状的欲望。我们坚持下去，因为满足和幸福似乎永远遥不可及。例如，当我们最终达到梦寐以求的工资水平时，我们会经历一个暂时的高水平，但不久我们就会渴望更多的钱。或者我们在Facebook上发布一些东西，得到121个“赞”;这种快乐很快就会让我们有一种想要发布一些能得到125个或更多“赞”的东西的欲望。在公民得分的世界里，这意味着一旦我们达到一个水平，我们不仅是需要更是想要提升（信用评分）。我们渴望的社会地位将永远无法掌握，这让我们几乎不可能满足于我们的身份和地位。

Sesame Credit plays on this in several ways. For example, it encourages users to guess whether they have a higher or lower score than their friends. When they check their own score, it also displays all their friends’ scores. But it’s not simply about competitiveness. It also means they can see who might be dragging them down. Conversely, people will be tempted to cultivate friends with good reputations for their own advantage. Want a loan to start a business? Better start being extra nice to influential people with high trust ratings and drop the losers.

芝麻信用在这方面发挥了多种作用。例如，它鼓励用户猜测他们的分数是比朋友高还是低。当他们检查自己的分数时，它也会显示所有朋友的分数。但这不仅仅是竞争力的问题。这也意味着他们可以看到是谁在拖他们的后腿。相反，人们会为了自己的优势而去结交有好名声的朋友。想要贷款创业?最好开始对那些拥有高信任度的有影响力的人特别好，然后甩掉那些失败者。

It will create some bizarre family dinner conversations. ‘Honey, I noticed your score dropped by thirty-eight points today,’ says a wife to her husband. ‘You know we need to maintain a high score to get that home improvement loan. And have you forgotten that our family score goes on our son’s college application next month? So what exactly did you do today, points-wise?’

这会产生一些奇怪的家庭晚餐对话。“亲爱的，我注意到你今天的分数下降了 38 分，”妻子对丈夫说。他说，你知道我们需要保持较高的分数才能获得住房改善贷款。你忘了下个月我们家的分数会被用在儿子的大学申请上吗?那么，你今天具体做了些什么呢?

As I learned more and more about China’s Citizen Scores, I kept thinking about the bestselling novel Super Sad True Love Story, which came out in 2010. It is set in a dystopian New York City in the not-too-distant future and author Gary Shteyngart imagines credit poles lining the streets that publicly announce your credit rating as you pass by. Lenny Abramov, a Russian Jew and the main American character, is something of a throwback because he still believes in the unquantifiable qualities of individuals. His boss and everyone else tell him that that kind of touchy-feely stuff doesn’t matter and that he needs to get his rating up.

随着我对中国公民分数的了解越来越多，我一直在想2010年出版的畅销小说《超级悲伤的真爱故事》(Super Sad True Love Story)。故事发生在不远的将来一个反乌托邦式的纽约，作家加里•施特恩加特(Gary Shteyngart)想象着，当你经过的时候，信贷柱排列在街道两旁，公开宣布你的信用评级。莱尼阿布拉莫夫(Lenny Abramov)是一位俄罗斯犹太人，也是美国人的主要角色。因为他仍然相信个人的无法量化的品质，所以他有点畏缩。他的老板和其他人告诉他,这种感性的东西并不重要,他需要他的评级上升。

Super Sad features a number of gadgets, and one that Lenny wears is an ‘Äppäräti’, a neck pendant with ‘RateMe Plus’ technology. It broadcasts personal data such as life expectancy, current cholesterol levels and even the wearer’s sexual history. ‘Let’s say you walk into a bar, it says, “OK, you’re the third-ugliest man in here, but you have the fifth-best credit rating,”’ explained Gary Shteyngart in an interview with The Atlantic. Forget ‘beer goggles’, even Google Glass–Äppäräti allows the wearer to check other people’s ratings in real time to ensure they are not hooking up with someone dishonest, or at least rated as dishonest. It’s not a very happy or trusting world. It’s narcissistic, ruthless and exhibitionist. And it might not be far off.

Super Sad 里有很多小玩意，伦尼戴的是一款名叫 Apparati 的脖子吊坠，上面有“RateMe Plus”技术。它会播放个人数据，如预期寿命、当前胆固醇水平，甚至佩戴者的性史。加里•施特恩加特(Gary Shteyngart)在接受《大西洋月刊》(the Atlantic)采访时说，“假设你走进一家酒吧，上面说，‘好吧，你是这里第三丑的男人，但你的信用评级却排在第五。’”忘记“啤酒眼”,甚至Google Glass-Apparati 允许使用者实时检查别人的信用评级,确保他们不是和不诚实或者至少被评为不诚实的人勾搭。这不是一个非常快乐或值得信任的世界。这是一种自恋、无情和爱出风头的表现。这可能也不远了。

Shteyngart’s haunting satire is a commentary on society’s obsession with needing to know where everyone else stands. It illustrates the perils of oversharing information with strangers and how everything from credit scores to health records could come to define us publicly, and with grave consequences, despite the whole business being made to look like an enticing game.

施特恩加特令人难忘的讽刺是对社会痴迷于需要知道其他人的立场的评论。它说明了与陌生人过度分享信息的危险，以及从信用评分到健康记录等各种信息是如何公开定义我们的，并带来严重后果的，尽管整个行业看上去像是一场诱人的游戏。

Indeed, Sesame Credit is basically a ‘big data’ gamified version of the Communist Party’s surveillance methods; the disquieting dang’an. The regime kept a dossier on every individual that tracked political and personal transgressions. A citizen’s dang’an followed them for life, from schools to jobs. People started reporting on friends and even family members, raising suspicion and lowering social trust in China. The same thing will happen with digital dossiers. People will have an incentive to say to their friends, spouses, family and colleagues, ‘Don’t post that. I don’t want you to hurt your score but I also don’t want you to hurt mine.’

事实上，芝麻信用基本上是一种“大数据”游戏化版的共产党监控手段；令人不安的档案。该政权对每一个人都有一份追踪政治和个人违法行为的档案。从学校到工作，《国民档案》终生追随他们。人们开始举报朋友甚至家庭成员，在中国引起了怀疑，降低了社会信任度。同样的事情也会发生在数字档案上。人们会有一种动力对他们的朋友、配偶、家人和同事说，“不要发布那个。”我不希望你降低你的分数，但我也不希望你降低我的分数。

The social pressure to conform to the party line and avoid any form of dissent will be immense. Negative or even contrary opinions will have no place. It’s mind-blowing to imagine the sameness this system encourages, how it will stamp out individualism. Who will dare to speak out? Maya Wang, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch China, based in Hong Kong, sees ‘a scary vision of the future’ in the system: currently there is intensive surveillance of ‘sensitive groups, such as dissidents, but the Social Credit System goes to another level. This is an effort of surveillance of all people,’ she says.

顺应党的路线和避免任何形式的异议的社会压力将是巨大的。负面甚至相反的意见将无处容身。想象一下这个系统所鼓励的相同之处，它将如何根除个人主义，这是十分魔幻的。谁敢说出来?总部位于香港的中国人权观察(Human Rights Watch China)发言人王玛雅(Maya Wang)认为，中国的社会信用体系“对未来有一种可怕的展望”:目前中国对“异议人士等敏感群体”进行了严密的监控，但社会信用体系却达到了另一个水平。她说，这是对所有人的监控。

Rogier Creemers wholeheartedly agrees with Wang. ‘The aim [in East Germany] was limited to avoiding a revolt against the regime. The Chinese aim is far more ambitious: it is clearly an attempt to create a new citizen.’

Rogier Creemers 完全同意王的观点。他说，(在东德)的目的仅限于避免反抗现政权。中国的目标要远大得多:这显然是一种创造新公民的尝试。

The new system reflects a cunning paradigm shift. As we’ve noted, instead of trying to enforce stability or conformity with a big stick and a good dose of top-down fear, the government is attempting to make obedience feel like gaming. It is a method of social control dressed up in some points-reward system. It’s gamified obedience.

新制度反映了一种巧妙的范式转变。正如我们所注意到的，政府试图让服从感觉像是在玩游戏，而不是试图用大棒和自上而下的恐惧来加强稳定性或一致性。这是一种社会控制的方法，在某些积分奖励制度下。这是游戏化的服从。

In a trendy neighbourhood in downtown Beijing, the BBC news services hit the streets in October 2015 to ask people about their Sesame Credit ratings. Most of the residents spoke about the upsides. But then, who would publicly criticize the system? Ding, your score might go down. ‘It is very convenient,’ one young woman said, smiling at the camera and proudly showing the journalist the score on her phone. ‘We booked a hotel last night using Sesame Credit and we didn’t need to leave a cash deposit.’ Alarmingly, few people seemed to understand that a bad score could hurt them in the future, preventing them from, say, signing a lease. Even more concerning was how many people, despite signing up for Sesame Credit, had no idea that they were being constantly rated.

2015年10月，在北京市中心一个时尚街区，BBC 新闻台走上街头，询问人们的芝麻信用分数。大多数居民谈到了它的好处。但是，谁会公开批评这个制度呢?叮，你的分数可能会下降。一位年轻女子微笑着对着镜头说，这非常方便。她自豪地用手机向记者展示了她的分数。他说，我们昨晚用芝麻信用(Sesame Credit)预订了一家酒店，不需要交现金押金。令人担忧的是,似乎只有很少的人明白一个坏分数将来可能伤害他们,阻止他们,比如,签订租约。更令人担忧的是，不知道有多少人尽管注册了芝麻信用(Sesame Credit)，但他们并不知道自己一直在被评分。

That kind of trusting ignorance is familiar, even if, in this case, it’s taking place in a far more advanced form of dystopia. Think of all those Facebook users who were surprised to find out they were being used as data lab rats. We sign up to all kinds of services without really knowing what we’re agreeing to and what is in our control to reject, if we choose to do so.

这种无知的信任是很常见的，即使在这种情况下——它发生在一种更高级的反乌托邦形式中。想想那些惊讶地发现自己被用作数据实验室老鼠的 Facebook 用户吧。我们注册各种各样的服务时，并不真正知道我们同意什么，也不知道如果我们选择拒绝，我们可以控制什么。

Currently, Sesame Credit does not directly penalize people for being ‘untrustworthy’–it’s far more effective to lock people in with treats for good behaviour. But Hu Tao, Sesame Credit’s chief manager, warns people that the system is designed so that ‘untrustworthy people can’t rent a car, can’t borrow money or even can’t find a job’. She has even disclosed that Sesame Credit has approached China’s Education Bureau about sharing the list of its students who cheated in national examinations, in order to make them pay in the future for their dishonesty.

目前，芝麻信用并不会直接惩罚那些“不值得信任”的人，而是会更有效地把人们关在良好行为的奖励里。但芝麻信贷的首席经理陶冬(Hu Tao)警告人们，该系统的设计宗旨是“不值得信任的人不能租车，不能借钱，甚至找不到工作”。她甚至还透露,芝麻信贷在和中国教育局谈共享在全国考试作弊的学生名单,为了使他们在未来付出代价。

Penalties are set to change dramatically when the government system becomes mandatory in 2020. Indeed, on 25 September 2016, the State Council General Office updated its policy entitled ‘Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking’. The overriding principle is simple: ‘If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere,’ the policy document states. The punishments will seriously affect the social mobility of any transgressors.

到 2020 年，当政府系统成为强制性规定时，惩罚措施将发生巨大变化。的确，2016 年 9 月 25 日，国务院办公厅更新了《违反信任被执行人的警告和处罚机制》政策。压倒一切的原则很简单:政策文件阐明“如果信任是在一个地方被破坏，到处都会有强制的限制。“惩罚将严重影响违法者的社会流动性。

For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet connectivity; restricted access to more desirable restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, ‘restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses’. Scores will influence a person’s rental application, their ability to get insurance, eligibility for a loan and even social security benefits. Chinese citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden altogether from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. People who do not rate well will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or enrolling their children in high-paying private schools. I am not fabricating this list of punishments. It’s the reality Chinese citizens will face. As the government document repeatedly states, the Social Credit System will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.

例如，评级较低的人上网速度较慢;被限制前往较受欢迎的餐厅、夜总会或高尔夫球场;以及取消在国外自由旅行的权利，我引用“对度假地区或旅游企业的消费进行限制性控制”。分数将影响一个人的租房申请，他们获得保险的能力，贷款的资格，甚至社会保障福利。分数较低的中国公民将不会被某些雇主雇佣，而且将被完全禁止获得某些工作，包括公务员、新闻工作者和法律工作者，这些工作当然需要你必须被认为是值得信赖的。成绩不佳的人也将受到限制，比如涉及到让自己或子女进入高支出的私立学校。我不是在编造这张惩罚清单。这是中国公民将要面对的现实。政府文件重复声明,社会信用体系将“一处失信、处处受限、寸步难行”。

Once again, life mirrors art. The system is strikingly similar to an episode of Black Mirror, the critically acclaimed dystopian sci-fi television series. Each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality, notes Charlie Brooker, the creator of this darkly witty series. ‘But they’re all about the way we live now–and the way we might be living in ten minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.’ Meaning if we do not carefully handle new technologies, they will pull us into a strange future much sooner than we expect. Indeed, many of the imagined scenarios have since become reality, including a chatbot that mimics deceased relatives (yes, this now exists–it is called Replika) and an obnoxious TV character who runs for political office to shake up a corrupt system. Not to mention a British PM who is forced to perform an insalubrious act with a pig on national television.

再一次，生活映像出了艺术。这套系统与广受好评的反乌托邦科幻电视剧《黑镜》(Black Mirror)中的一集惊人地相似。这部黑色幽默剧集的创作者查理布鲁克(Charlie Brooker)指出，每一集都有不同的演员阵容、不同的背景，甚至是不同的现实。“但它们都是关于我们现在的生活方式——如果我们粗心大意的话，十分钟后我们可能就会变成这样。”“ 也就是说如果我们不仔细衡量新技术,他们会把我们推向一个陌生的未来，而且会比我们预期的要快得多。事实上，许多想象中的场景后来都变成了现实，包括一个模仿已故亲属的聊天机器人(是的，它现在已经存在了——它被称为Replika)，以及一个讨厌的电视角色，他竞选政治职位，以撼动一个腐败的体系。更不用提英国首相被迫在国家电视台上与一头猪做不健康的行为了。

‘Nosedive’, the first episode of the third season, envisions a world in which each of us continually chases after a desirable rating that sums up how people feel about us in real time. Your score, out of five stars, is affected by everyone–family members, friends, co-workers and anonymous passers-by–and is used for everything, no matter how trivial. Did the barista pour a nice swirl of milk on your coffee? You can reward him for that. Did a woman look you up and down the wrong way in your thirty-second elevator ride? You can make her pay for that. Be warned, though, your own rating might fall if she returns fire and rates you negatively.

《暴跌》(Nosedive)是第三季的第一集，它描绘了一个世界，在这个世界里，我们每个人都在不断追求一个理想的评分，这个评分可以实时总结人们对我们的感觉。你的分数(满分5星)会受到每一个人的影响——家人、朋友、同事和匿名路人。不论事情多么微小，这个评分都将适用。咖啡师在你的咖啡里加了一圈牛奶吗?你可以为此奖赏他。在你 32 秒的电梯旅程中，有女人上下打量你的方式不对吗?你可以让她为此付出代价。不过，请注意，如果她回敬你，给你负面评价，你自己的评分可能会下降。

The main character, Lacie Pound, lives her life constantly trying to please everyone in exchange for a few precious points. She has to work hard to maintain her solid but not outstanding 4.2 rating. She even practises her fake smile in the bathroom mirror every morning. Her value in this world is equivalent to her points, which she checks obsessively after every tiny interaction.

主角 Lacie Pound 的一生都在努力取悦每一个人，以换取一些宝贵的分数。她必须努力保持自己稳定但不突出的 4.2 分。她甚至每天早上在浴室的镜子前练习假笑。她在这个世界上的价值等同于她的分数，每一次微小的互动之后，她都会如痴如醉地查看分数。

What does Lacie’s life tell us about the way the world is moving? Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford, and the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, has an interesting way of framing it. Many make the claim to be an expert on ‘digital disruption’, but Floridi is the real deal. He is currently serving as the only ethicist on Google’s advisory committee on the European Union’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling. It’s a role that has seen him crowned ‘Google’s Philosopher’.

关于世界的变化，莱西的生活告诉了我们什么?牛津大学(University of Oxford)信息哲学与伦理教授、牛津互联网研究所(Oxford Internet Institute)研究主管卢西亚诺·弗洛里迪(Luciano Floridi)用一种有趣的方式对其进行了阐述。许多人声称自己是“数字颠覆”方面的专家，但弗洛里迪才是真正的专家。目前，他是谷歌关于欧盟“被遗忘权”裁决的咨询委员会中唯一的伦理学家。这个角色见证了他加冕“谷歌的哲学家”。

According to Floridi, there have been three critical ‘de-centring shifts’ that have altered our view in self-understanding: Copernicus’s model of the earth orbiting the sun; Darwin’s theory of natural selection; and Freud’s claim that our daily actions are controlled by the unconscious mind.

弗洛里迪认为，有三个关键的“重心转移”改变了我们对自我理解的看法:哥白尼的地球绕太阳运行的模型;达尔文的自然选择理论;和弗洛伊德的说法,我们的日常行为是由潜意识控制。

Floridi believes we are now entering the fourth shift in our world, as what we do online and offline merge into an onlife. He asserts that as our world increasingly becomes an infosphere, a mixture of physical and virtual experiences, we are acquiring onlife personality–different from who we innately are in the ‘real world’ alone. We see this writ large on Facebook, where people present a carefully edited or idealized portrait of their lives. When I look at some of my friends’ streams–beautiful pictures of holidays and their kids angelically dressed up in costumes–I wonder, is this the same friend complaining about her husband and bratty five-year-old? I do the same. I edit the flaws and inconsistencies in my life, disguising my true messy self.

弗洛里迪认为，我们现在正进入世界的第四次转变，因为我们在网上和网下所做的一切都融入了 onlife。他断言，随着我们的世界日益成为一个信息领域，一个物理和虚拟体验的混合体，我们正在获得一种“onlife”的个性——与我们天生在“真实世界”中的个性不同。在 Facebook 上我们看到这显而易见,人们精心编辑或理想化他们的生活。当我看着我的一些朋友的美丽假期和孩子们天使般地穿着costumes-I wonder的照片,这和那个抱怨她的丈夫的朋友是一个人么？这和那个讨厌的五岁小孩是一个人吗？我也这么做。我编辑我生活中的缺点和矛盾，掩盖我混乱的真实生活。

In Black Mirror, Lacie’s onlife personality is the extreme version of the future Floridi is talking about. Her life has become an exhausting, dramatic public performance. She has discovered that the only way she can afford her dream apartment is by raising her rating. So she visits a score counsellor for advice. Then, out of the blue, Naomi, an old school friend and social media star with a higher rating, asks Lacie to be maid of honour at her wedding. With many prime influencers (high-ranking wedding guests) attending, Lacie is convinced a tear-jerking bridesmaid’s speech will get her the upvotes she needs. The speech, of course, turns into a disaster but that’s not the point here. Or maybe it is.

在《黑镜》中，Lacie 的 onlife 人格是 Floridi 所说的未来的极端版本。她的生活变成了一场令人筋疲力尽的戏剧性的公众表演。她发现唯一能负担得起她梦想的公寓的方法就是提高她的评分。所以她去找了一位评分顾问寻求建议。然后，出乎意料的是，娜奥米——一个获得了更高的评分的老校友和社交媒体明星，要求拉茜在她的婚礼上做伴娘。有很多有影响力的重要人物(婚礼的高级来宾)出席，Lacie相信一个催人泪下的伴娘演讲会让她得到她需要的支持。当然，演讲变成了一场灾难，但这不是重点。也许是这样。

The rating system in Black Mirror is based on social approval, on likes and stars; as we see with Lacie, it encourages people to base relationships on personal gain and to fake behaviour. Disturbingly, that episode is not so very far from the ‘onlife’ we are living right now.

《黑镜》的评分系统是基于社会认可、喜欢和评星；正如我们在 Lacie 身上看到的，它鼓励人们将人际关系建立在个人利益的基础上，并做出虚假的行为。令人不安的是，这一幕离我们现在的“onlife”并不远。

Think about your Uber experiences. Are you just a little bit nicer and friendlier to the driver because you know you will also be rated? Indeed, judgement and scores are a two-way street. Some days, I like my conversations with drivers. I appreciate the serendipitous connections that sometimes emerge because I sit in the front and we talk. However, there are times I wish my Uber ride could be a simple transaction: where the driver does not know my name or have a picture of me; where I feel no pressure to be nice; where I am not asked what I do or how many kids I have.

想想你的乘坐 Uber 经历。你是不是因为知道自己也会被评分而对司机更友好一点？的确，判断和分数是双向的。有时候，我喜欢和司机聊天。我欣赏偶尔出现的偶然的联系，因为我坐在前排，我们聊天。然而，有时我希望我的 Uber 之旅可以是一个简单的交易:司机不知道我的名字，也没有我的照片;在那里，我没有需要表现出友善的压力;没有人问我做什么，有多少孩子。

I once berated my husband down the phone during a trip because he told me he was running late, again. I was tired. It hadn’t been a particularly good day. The driver said to me, ‘If I were your husband and you shouted like that, I would be late.’ It’s rude that I shouted in his car but, frankly, it’s none of his business.

我曾经在一次旅行中通过电话斥责我的丈夫，因为他告诉我他又要迟到了。我累了。这不是美好的一天。司机对我说:‘如果我是你丈夫，你就那样大喊大叫，我就迟到了。我在他的车里大喊大叫是不礼貌的，但坦率地说，这不关他的事。

The pressure to be rated means I am tempted to be falsely polite and not authentic. Yet it’s not as if I am unused to being rated and reviewed. After a speech, I can see exactly how many people thought it was ‘fantastic’ or ‘a waste of time’. People ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ my talks on TED, my slides on Slideshare and my posts on Medium. My students at Oxford break my teaching ability down into a detailed survey. People send me not just complimentary remarks but also scathing comments about my ideas and articles. I have learned to be comfortable having all my imperfections pointed out and even so I still worry about how I measure up on an Uber ride. I am human; I need to be liked and–more to the point–I want drivers to continue to pick me up.

被评价的压力意味着我尝试着表现出错误的礼貌，并且不真诚。然而，我并不是不习惯被评价和评论。演讲结束后，我可以确切地看到有多少人认为这是“美妙的”或“浪费时间”。人们“喜欢”或“不喜欢”我在 TED上的演讲，我在 Slideshare 上的幻灯片，以及我在 Medium 上的帖子。我在牛津大学的学生把我的教学能力分成了几个部分。人们给我寄来的不只是赞美之词，还有对我的想法和文章的尖刻评论。我已经学会了坦然面对所有的不完美，即便如此，我仍然担心自己在优步上的表现。我是人类;我需要被喜欢，更重要的是，我希望司机们继续接我。

Yet I don’t want to worry ceaselessly about how I am being rated, whether I am late or punctual, rude or a darling, dirty or clean. I am frightened of ending up like Lacie. I am frightened my children will live in a society where scores become the ultimate truth of who they are. A paranoid world where they are under never-ending pressure to present an idealized portrait of their lives, not just for ‘likes’ but because of fear of how they’re measuring up against others, minute by minute, year by year, and how it will affect their future prospects. How will I teach them what it means to be your authentic self?

然而，我不想没完没了地担心别人对我的评价，担心我迟到还是守时，担心我粗鲁还是可爱，担心我邋遢还是干净。我害怕最后像莱西一样。我担心我的孩子们将生活在一个分数决定他们是谁的终极真相的社会里。在这个偏执的世界里，他们承受着无休止的压力，要展示一幅理想化的生活图景，这不仅仅是为了“点赞”，也是因为他们担心自己如何与他人一分一秒、一年又一年地进行比较，以及这将如何影响他们的未来前景。我要怎么教他们做真实的自己是什么意思?

The information we liberally post about ourselves today might end up being rated in some way down the track–but that doesn’t stop us. We have become hooked, literally, on displaying our lives and doings. A few years ago, Diana Tamir, an associate professor of psychology at Princeton University, and Jason Mitchell of Harvard’s Neuroscience Lab, published a paper titled ‘Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding’. Surveys of internet use show that more than 80 per cent of posts to social media sites consist simply of announcements about a user’s immediate experience, such as what they are about to eat for dinner. The researchers asked participants to undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while making these kinds of posts, to see what happens to their brains. And what happens is that our reward centres light up, just as they do with primary rewards such as food and sex. That is why we strive to post more. As Dave Eggers brilliantly puts it, it’s the addictive digital-social equivalent of snack food, ‘endless empty calories’. And it’s far from nourishing.

我们今天随意发布的关于自己的信息最终可能会以某种方式被评价——但这并没有阻止我们。毫不夸张地说，我们已经沉迷于展示我们的生活和行为。几年前，普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)心理学副教授戴安娜•塔米尔(Diana Tamir)和哈佛大学神经科学实验室(Harvard ' s Neuroscience Lab)的贾森•米切尔(Jason Mitchell)发表了一篇名为《披露自我信息是一种内在奖励》的论文。对互联网使用情况的调查显示，在社交媒体网站上发布的帖子中，有80%以上只是简单地介绍了用户的即时体验，比如晚餐吃什么。 研究人员要求参与者在阅读这些类型的帖子时接受功能性磁共振成像(fMRI),来看到他们的大脑发生了什么。结果是，我们的奖赏中枢会变亮，就像它们对食物和性等主要奖赏所做的那样。这就是为什么我们努力发更多的动态。正如戴夫•埃格斯(Dave Eggers)一针见血地指出那样：，这是一种令人上瘾的数字社交类零食，相当于“无尽的空热量”。而且它也没有营养。

Uber ratings are nothing compared to Peeple, an app launched in March 2016, which is like a Yelp for humans. It allows you to assign ratings and reviews to everyone you know–your neighbour, your boss, your teacher, your spouse and even your ex. A profile displays a ‘Peeple Number’, a score based on all the feedback and recommendations you receive. Worryingly, once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t opt out. You must use your real name to leave a review, be over twenty-one and of course have a Facebook account. You must also affirm that you know the person you are rating based on one of three categories: professional, personal or dating (that is, how good they are at dating). The app is basically allowing you to judge and publicly reduce people to a grade without consent. Sound familiar?

与2016年3月推出的类似于人类吠叫的应用程序 Peeple 相比，优步的评级简直是小巫见大巫。它允许你给所有你认识的人指定评级和评论，——你的邻居,你的老板,你的老师,你的配偶,甚至你的前任。一个概要文件显示一个“ Peeple 分数”,得分基于所有你收到的反馈和建议。令人担忧的是，一旦有人把你的名字放进了偷看系统，它就在那里，你对此无能为力。你不能选择退出。你必须使用你的真实姓名来留下评论，还要超过21岁，当然还有一个Facebook账户。你还必须确认，你知道你所评估的人是基于以下三种因素中的一种：职业、个人或约会(也就是他们约会的能力)。这款应用基本上可以让你在未经允许的情况下对人进行评判并公开打分。听起来是不是很熟悉?

Peeple has forbidden certain bad behaviours including mentioning private health conditions, expressing profanities or being sexist (however you objectively assess that). There are, however, very few rules on how people are graded or standards about transparency. The app does include a feature called a ‘Truth License’. According to the company’s press release, ‘The Peeple Truth License shows you everything that has been written about a person, whether it was published live on their profile or not. This allows you to make better decisions about the people around you.’ One of the key reasons why Nicole McCullough, Peeple co-founder and a mother of two, developed the app was that, in a world where people don’t know their neighbours, she wanted help to decide whom to trust with her kids.

Peeple 禁止某些不良行为，包括提及私人健康状况，表达不敬或性别歧视(无论你是否客观评价)。然而，关于如何给人打分或透明度的标准，几乎没有什么规定。这款应用确实包含了一个名为“真相许可”的功能。该公司发布的新闻稿称，“《Peeple 真相许可证》向你展示了关于一个人的所有信息，无论这些信息是否在他们的个人资料上实时发布。”这能让你对周围的人做出更好的决定。Peeple 创始人之一和一个两个孩子的母亲，妮可•麦卡洛——想要开发应用的一个关键原因是,在这样一个人们不了解他们邻居的世界，她想要帮助判断她的孩子可以。

Fittingly, the founders have been publishing a reality documentary on YouTube about every step involved in building Peeple. ‘It doesn’t matter how far apart we are in likes or dislikes,’ co-founder Julia Cordray tells a total stranger in a bar in episode ten of the YouTube documentary. ‘All that matters is what people say about us.’

恰如其分的是，两位创始人在 YouTube 上发布了一部关于建立 Peeple 的每一步的真人纪录片。在 十集的 YouTube 纪录片里，联合创始人朱莉娅•科德雷(Julia Cordray)在酒吧里对一个完全陌生的人说，我们在喜欢或不喜欢的程度上并不重要，最重要的是人们怎么说我们。”

What are the consequences of boxing people into a number and a value?

将人限制为一个数字和值的结果是什么?

This question comes to life in a particularly memorable scene in Black Mirror. Lacie is at the airport on her way to Naomi’s wedding. Dressed like a pink pastel daydream, she approaches the check-in counter, all smiles. When she places her phone on the scanner her details, including her rating and PMA (positive mental attitude), flash on the check-in agent’s screen. Unfortunately, her flight is cancelled and the airline representative can’t book her on to another standby flight because Lacie’s social credit score has dropped. On the way to the airport, her score dipped to a 4.183 after she got into a squabble with a woman while getting into her taxi. Her explanation doesn’t matter; the system automatically blocks the agent from booking her on to the flight without the correct 4.2 rating. She ends up hitching a ride with a female truck driver who has a dismal 1.4 rating. The trucker shares the moving story of how she, too, was obsessed with her rating, until her husband got terminal cancer. He was denied treatment he badly needed; it was given to another patient with a higher score. ‘So I figure,’ the trucker tells Lacie with a smile, ‘fuck it.’ It makes me wonder, will we see similar movements of anti-rating people happy to be poorly ranked?

这个问题出现在《黑镜》中一个特别难忘的场景中。Lacie 在去参加 Naomi 婚礼的时候在机场。她打扮得像个粉色的白日梦，微笑着走到值机柜台前。当她把手机放在扫描仪上时，她的详细信息，包括她的评分和 PMA (积极的心理态度)，就会闪现在值机人员的屏幕上。不幸的是，她的航班被取消了，航空公司代表无法为她预订另一个备用航班，因为她的社会信用评分下降了。在去机场的路上，她的分数降到了4.183，因为她在坐出租车的时候和一名女性发生了口角。她的解释无关紧要;如果没有正确的 4.2 评分，系统会自动阻止代理为她预订航班。她最终搭上了一名评分仅为1.4的女卡车司机。这位卡车司机分享了一个感人的故事:在她丈夫得了晚期癌症之前，她也是如此痴迷于自己的评级。他迫切需要的治疗被拒绝;给了另一位得分较高的病人。“所以我想，”卡车司机笑着对莱西说，“去他妈的。”这让我想知道，我们是否会看到反对评级的人也会因为排名靠后而高兴呢?

Black Mirror has become somewhat of a Magic 8 Ball, predicting the future. China’s trust system might be voluntary as yet, but it’s already having Lacie-like consequences. In February 2017, China’s Supreme People’s Court announced that 6.15 million people in the country had been banned from taking flights over the past four years for social misdeeds. The travel ban is being pointed to as the first indication of how people blacklisted in the Social Credit System, so called ‘trust-breakers’, will be punished. ‘We have signed a memorandum… [with over] 44 government departments in order to limit “discredited” people on multiple levels,’ says Meng Xiang, head of the executive department of the Supreme Court. Another 1.65 million people cannot take trains, because they are on the social credit blacklist for misdemeanours. They have been downgraded and branded as second-class citizens. This isn’t TV. It isn’t marketing. It’s reality.

“黑镜”在某种程度上已经变成了一个神奇的预言未来的球。中国的信用制度目前可能是自愿的，但它已经产生了类似莱西的后果。2017年2月，中国最高人民法院宣布，在过去四年里，中国有 615 万人因社会不端行为被禁止乘坐飞机。旅行禁令被指是第一个表明被列入社会信用体系黑名单(即所谓的“破坏信任者”)的人将如何受到惩罚的迹象。中国最高人民法院执行院长项蒙（Meng Xiang）说，我们已经与超过44个政府部门签署了一份备忘录，从多个层面限制“不诚信”的人。165 万人不能乘火车,因为他们在社会信用黑名单上的不端行为。他们的社会地位已经下降并被看作二等公民。这不是电视剧。它不是营销。这是现实。

Where these systems really descend into nightmarish territory is that the trust algorithms used are unfairly reductive. They don’t tell the whole story. They don’t take into account context and valid reasons for a bad day. For instance, one person might miss paying a bill or a fine because they were in hospital; another may simply be a freeloader. But there is no one sitting and analysing every Citizen Score assessment, going, ‘Oh, okay, she was having an operation and that explains why she didn’t pay her credit card.’ And therein lies the urgent challenge facing all of us in the digital world, and not just the Chinese. If life-determining algorithms are here to stay, and it certainly looks that way, we need to figure out how they can embrace the nuances, inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in human beings. We need to work out how they can reflect real life.

让这些系统真正陷入噩梦般的境地的是——所使用的不公平的还原信用算法。它们不会告诉你全部的故事。他们没有考虑到糟糕的一天的背景和正当理由。例如，一个人可能因为住院而无法支付账单或罚款;另一个可能只是一个吃白食的人。但没有人坐在那里分析每个公民的得分评估，然后说，‘哦，好吧，她在做手术，这就解释了她为什么不支付信用卡。’这就是我们所有人在数字世界面临的紧迫挑战，而不仅仅是中国人。如果决定生活的算法继续存在，而且看起来确实如此，我们需要弄清楚它们如何能包容人类固有的细微差别、不一致性和矛盾。我们需要弄清楚它们是如何反映现实生活的。

You could see China’s so-called ‘trust plan’ as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Pavlov’s dogs. Act like a good citizen, be rewarded and be made to think you’re having fun. It’s worth remembering, however, that personal scoring systems have been present in the West for decades.

你可以把中国所谓的“信任计划”看作是奥威尔的《一九八四》遇到巴甫洛夫的狗。表现得像个好公民，得到奖励，让别人觉得你很开心。然而，值得记住的是，个人评分系统在西方已经存在了几十年。

More than seventy years ago, two men called Bill Fair and Earl Isaac invented credit scores. They met at Stanford University in San Jose, California, where Fair was studying engineering and Isaac mathematics. They started their own company with just $400 apiece. The goal was to use predictive analytics, and the new-fangled capabilities of computers, to give lenders a unified view of a person’s credit risk. Specifically, the duo wanted to use algorithms to study customers’ past behaviour, predict future behaviour and come up with a credit score. At the time, it was regarded as a radical concept.

七十多年前，比尔·费尔和厄尔·艾萨克发明了信用评分。他们在加州圣何塞的斯坦福大学相遇，费尔在那里学习工程学和艾萨克数学。他们用每人的 400 美元创办了自己的公司。的目标是使用预测分析,和电脑的新奇功能,给银行出具一个人的信用风险的统一视图。具体来说，两人希望利用算法研究客户的过去行为，预测未来行为，并得出信用评分。当时，它被认为是一个激进的概念。

Initially, the idea of credit scores didn’t take off. Fair and Isaac sent a letter to fifty of the largest lenders in the United States offering them the new technology. Only one responded. But in 1958, the first credit score, known today as FICO (short for the Fair Isaac Corporation), was created. Over the years, it has positively challenged many lenders’ practices and prejudices. ‘Good credit does not wear a coat and tie’ was the headline on one advertisement. FICO proved time and time again that race, for example, was not a predictor of good credit risk and refused to put it in their scoring system.

起初，信用评分的想法并没有成功。费尔和艾萨克给美国 50 家大银行写了一封信提供这项新技术。只有一个回应。但是在1958年，第一个信用评分，即今天的FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation的缩写)，诞生了。多年来，它积极地挑战了许多银行的做法和偏见。一个广告的标题是“良好的信用不需要穿外套打领带”。例如，FICO一次又一次地证明，种族并不能预测良好的信用风险，并拒绝将其纳入他们的评分系统。

Today, companies use FICO scores to determine many financial decisions, including the interest rate on our mortgage or whether we should be given a loan. The score range is 300 to 850, with the high number representing less risk to the lender or insurer. Remarkably, it wasn’t until 2003 that we could find out our actual score. Before then, they had been kept a secret. And despite the significance of credit scores to our lives, repeated studies show that more than 60 per cent of Americans still do not know their score or simply have not bothered to find out.

如今，公司使用 FICO 评分来决定许多财务决策，包括抵押贷款的利率或我们是否应该获得贷款。得分范围为300到850，其中较高的数字代表贷款人或保险公司的风险较小。值得注意的是，直到 2003 年我们才知道我们的实际得分。在那之前,他们一直保持着秘密。尽管信用分数对我们的生活有很大的意义，重复的研究显示，超过60%的美国人仍然不知道他们的分数或者只是懒得去查。

For the majority of Chinese people, it is not a case of knowing or not. In a catch-22, they have never had credit scores and so they can’t get credit. ‘Many people don’t own houses, cars or credit cards in China, so that kind of information isn’t available to measure,’ explains Wen Quan, an influential blogger who writes about technology and finance. ‘The central bank has the financial data from 800 million people, but only 320 million have a traditional credit history.’ According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the annual economic loss caused by lack of credit information is more than 600 billion yuan, approximately $97 billion.

对大多数中国人来说，这不是一个知道或不知道的问题。在第 22 条规定中，他们从来没有信用分数，所以他们得不到信用。科技和金融博主权文（Wen Quan）解释说：“在中国，很多人没有房子、汽车或信用卡，所以这类信息无法衡量。”央行有来自 8 亿人的财务数据，但只有 3.2 亿人有传统的信贷记录。据中国商务部测算，（这样）每年造成的经济损失缺乏信用信息超过 6000 亿元,大约 970 亿美元。

China’s lack of a national credit system is why the government is adamant that Citizen Scores are long overdue and badly needed to fix what they refer to as a trust deficit. In a poorly regulated market, the sale of counterfeit and substandard products is a massive problem. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 63 per cent of all fake goods, from watches to handbags to baby food, originate from China. In late 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Health revealed six babies had died and almost 300,000 had fallen ill after drinking baby formula deliberately laced with melamine, a toxic chemical used in plastics and fertilizer. Turns out, a local manufacturer had intentionally added the industrial chemical to mask low protein levels in watered-down formula. Since this massive breach of trust, Chinese customers have bought baby formula milk, loads of it, from overseas. So much so that some big British retailers such as Boots and Sainsbury’s decided to set a two-can limit to prevent bulk buying to feed the Chinese market leaving a shortage of tins on the shelves.

中国缺乏全国性的信用体系，这就是为什么政府坚持认为，公民评分早就应该施行，迫切需要它来弥补他们所称的信任赤字。在一个监管不力的市场，销售假冒伪劣产品是一个巨大的问题。根据经济合作与发展组织(OECD)的数据，从手表、手袋到婴儿食品，63%的假货来自中国。在2008年年底,中国卫生部透露 6 名婴儿死亡,近 300, 000 孩子在喝了故意添加了三聚氰胺（一种有毒化学物质,用于塑料和化肥）的婴儿配方奶粉后生病了。事实证明，当地一家制造商有意添加这种工业化学品，以掩盖稀释配方中蛋白质含量低的问题。自从这起严重的信任缺失事件发生以来，中国消费者已经从海外购买了大量的婴儿配方奶粉。如此之多，以至于一些英国大型零售商，如博姿(Boots)和塞恩斯伯里(Sainsbury’s)，决定设置两罐限量，以防止为满足中国市场而进行的大宗采购，导致货架上的罐头出现短缺。

In January 2017, Chinese authorities discovered a ‘production hub’ of around fifty factories that were generating counterfeit products designed to look exactly like well-known brands. Jack Ma has called fake goods ‘cancer’ to Alibaba but crackdown efforts to weed out fakes have had an uphill battle. ‘Food security, counterfeiting and a lack of regulatory compliance are real issues for Chinese citizens. The level of micro corruption is enormous,’ says Rogier Creemers. ‘Up and down the ladder, trust is a huge problem in China. So if this particular scheme results in more effective oversight and accountability, it will likely be warmly welcomed.’

2017年1月，中国有关部门发现了一个由大约 50 家工厂组成的“生产中心”，这些工厂生产的仿冒产品外观酷似知名品牌。马云曾将假货称为阿里巴巴的“癌症”，但打击假货的努力却遇到了一场艰难的战斗。对中国公民来说，食品安全、假冒伪劣和监管不力是真正的问题。微观腐败的程度是巨大的。在中国，信任是一个大问题。因此，如果这个特别的计划能带来更有效的监督和问责制，它可能会受到热烈欢迎。

The government also argues that the system is a way to bring in those people left out of traditional credit systems, such as students, low-income households and those who have never borrowed money. Professor Wang Shuqin from the Office of Philosophy and Social Science at Capital Normal University in China recently won the bid to help the government develop the system that she refers to as ‘China’s Social Faithful System’. Without such a mechanism, doing business in China is risky, she stresses, as about half of the signed contracts are not kept. ‘Especially given the speed of the digital economy, it is crucial that people can quickly verify each other’s creditworthiness,’ she says. ‘The behaviour of the majority is determined by their world of thoughts. A person who believes in socialist core values is behaving more decently.’ In other words, she regards the ‘moral standards’ the system assesses, as well as financial data, as a ‘bonus’.

政府还认为，该体系是一种吸收那些被传统信贷体系排除在外的人的方式，比如学生、低收入家庭和从未借钱的人。首都师范大学哲学社会科学办公室的王淑琴教授最近中标，帮助政府开发她称之为“中国社会诚信体系”的系统。她强调，如果没有这样的机制，在中国做生意是有风险的，因为大约有一半的合同没有得到履行。她说，“特别是考虑到数字经济的速度，人们能够迅速核实彼此的信用等级是至关重要的。”大多数人的行为是由他们的思想世界决定的。一个相信社会主义核心价值观的人，行为更加得体。' 换句话说,她将“道德标准的系统评估,以及财务数据,看作“奖金”。

Indeed, the State Council’s primary objective is to raise the ‘honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society’ in order to improve ‘the over-all competitiveness of the country’. In other words, the government is selling Citizen Scores as a tool to evaluate people more fairly and improve economic vitality.

的确，国务院的首要目标是提高“全社会的诚信意识和信用水平”，以提高“国家的综合竞争力”。换句话说,政府出售公民分数作为一种工具来更公平地评估人，提高经济活力。

Is it remotely possible that the Social Credit System in China is in fact a more desirably transparent approach to surveillance in a country that has a long history of watching its citizens? ‘As a Chinese person, knowing that everything I do online is being tracked, would I rather be aware of the details of what is being monitored and use this information to teach myself how to abide by the rules of government?’ asks Rasul Majid, a Chinese blogger based in Shanghai who writes about behavioural design and gaming psychology. ‘Or would I rather live in ignorance and hope/wish/dream that personal privacy still exists and that our ruling bodies respect us enough not to take advantage?’ Put simply, Majid thinks that the system gives him a tiny bit more control over his data.

在一个监视公民的历史悠久的国家，中国的社会信用体系实际上是一种更加透明的监视方式，这种可能性微乎其微吗?他说，作为一个中国人，我知道自己在网上做的每一件事都在被跟踪，我宁愿知道被监控内容的细节，并用这些信息来教会自己如何遵守政府的规定吗?居住在上海的中国博主马吉德(Rasul Majid)问道。“或者我宁愿生活在无知和希望/希望/梦想中，个人隐私仍然存在，我们的统治机构足够尊重我们，不会利用我们?”“简言之, Majid 认为系统给了他一点点更多的控制他的数据。

On the one hand, a social credit system will almost certainly encourage people to act more honestly and to abide by the rules. On the other, it’s a deeply disturbing version of reputation economics that will give governments unprecedented control over what they consider good and bad ways to behave.

一方面，社会信用体系几乎肯定会鼓励人们更加诚实地行事并遵守规则。另一方面，这是一种非常令人不安的声誉经济学，它将赋予政府前所未有的控制权，来决定他们认为好的和坏的行为方式。

When I tell people living in the Western world about the Social Credit System in China, their responses are fervent, visceral. After a speech I gave at a financial conference, a female banker remarked, ‘We routinely do things that just five years ago would have made no sense to us, but that idea is bat-shit crazy.’ Her sense of alarm was typical. Many people have asked if it is really true, if it is really happening in China. Surprisingly, very few people ask the more pertinent question, ‘Could this happen in the Western world?’ Or rather, when can we expect it?

当我告诉生活在西方世界的人们中国的社会信用体系时，他们的反应是热烈的、发自内心的。在我在一次金融会议上发表演讲后，一位女银行家说，我们经常做一些在五年前对我们来说毫无意义的事情，但这个想法太疯狂了。她的警觉是典型的。许多人问这是不是真的，是否真的发生在中国。令人惊讶的是，很少有人会问这样一个更切题的问题:“这种情况会在西方世界发生吗?””“或者更确切地说，我们什么时候能得到它呢?

We already rate restaurants, movies, books and even doctors. We’ve seen how Peeple rates people. You can even rate your bowel movements online (check out ratemypoo.com if you don’t believe me). ‘Yelpers’, customers who regularly leave reviews on Yelp, will threaten hotels and restaurants with poor reviews if they don’t please them by giving them, say, complimentary drinks. Authors have Amazon scores. Airbnb hosts and guests have cleanliness scores. Teachers have RateMyProfessors.com scores. Errand runners on Taskrabbit, Deliveroo drivers and a whole plethora of other ‘gig workers’ are rated (and they rate customers back). ‘Klout scores’, that claim to identify the most influential social media users, are even appearing on some people’s résumés as proof of their stellar reputation. Fitbit captures how much you move (or don’t) and gives you a fitness score that it shares with multiple companies. On an app called DateCheck, you can even do an instant background check on someone you’ve just met in a bar. Its tagline is, fittingly, ‘Look up before you hook up’. Facebook is now capable of identifying you in pictures without seeing your face; it only needs your clothes, hair and body type to tag you in an image with 83 per cent accuracy. It’s kind of like how I can recognize my husband from a hundred metres away by his gait.

我们已经对餐馆、电影、书籍甚至医生进行了评级。我们已经看到人们是如何评价人的。你甚至可以在网上给你的大便评分(如果你不相信我，可以上 ratemypoo.com)。Yelp上的“Yelpers”是指经常在 Yelp 上留下评论的顾客，如果酒店和餐馆没有提供免费饮料(比如免费饮料)来取悦他们，他们就会用差评来威胁酒店和餐馆。作者有亚马逊评分。Airbnb 的房东和客人都有清洁度评分。教师有 ratemyprofessor。com 的分数。Taskrabbit 上的跑腿者、Deliveroo 驱动程序和大量其他“零工工人”都得到了评级(他们还会给客户打分)。“Klout分数”(Klout scores)号称能识别出最具影响力的社交媒体用户，它甚至出现在一些人的简历上，作为他们显赫声誉的证明。Fitbit 会记录你的运动量(或运动量)，并给你一个健身评分，与多家公司共享。在一个名为 DateCheck 的应用程序上，你甚至可以对刚在酒吧认识的人进行即时背景调查。它的口号恰如其分地是，“在你勾搭之前先抬头看看”。Facebook 现在可以在不看到你的脸的情况下识别你的照片;它只需要你的衣服、头发和体型就能以83%的准确率将你标记在一张图片上。这就像我可以根据步态从从一百米开外认出我的丈夫。

In 2015, the OECD published a study revealing that in the United States there are at least 24.9 connected devices per every one hundred inhabitants. All kinds of companies scrutinize the ‘big data’ emitted from these devices to understand our lives, desires and psyches, and to predict our future actions, in ways that we couldn’t even predict for ourselves.

2015年，经合组织发布的一项研究显示，在美国，每 100 名居民中至少有 24.9 台联网设备。各种公司仔细检查这些设备发射的“大数据”来了解我们的生活,欲望和心理,并预测未来的行为,甚至是那些我们都不能预测的我们的未来。

When I get on the bus on my way to work, I put on my headphones. It’s a morning ritual that gives me some sense of personal privacy in a crowded public space. My listening habits, especially the podcasts, audio books and news programmes I download, would provide a clear window into my political preferences, life stresses, religious views and various other interests. So what would happen if someone knew what I was listening to?

当我在上班的路上登上公共汽车时，我戴上耳机。这是一种早晨的习惯，在拥挤的公共空间给了我一些个人隐私的感觉。我的聆听习惯，尤其是我下载的播客、有声读物和新闻节目，将为我的政治偏好、生活压力、宗教观点和其他各种兴趣提供一个清晰的窗口。如果有人知道我在听什么，会发生什么?

On 18 April 2017, a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in Chicago accused a high-end audio-equipment maker of spying on its customers’ listening habits. After paying $350 for his QuietComfort 35 headphones, Kyle Zak, the lead plaintiff in the case, followed Bose’s suggestion to ‘get the most out of your headphones’ by downloading its Connect app to his smartphone. He provided his name, email address and headphone serial number as part of the sign-up process. And like most of us, he handed over his information without much thought. The app adds functions such as the ability to customize the level of noise cancellation in the headphones. But the app also tracks the music, podcasts and other audio Bose customers listen to, and violates privacy rights by selling the information to various third parties, including a data-mining company called Segment.io. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Bose responded with a company statement: ‘We’ll fight the inflammatory, misleading allegations made against us through the legal system. Nothing is more important to us than your trust. We work tirelessly to earn and keep it, and have for over fifty years. That’s never changed, and never will.’

2017年4月18日，芝加哥一家联邦法院提起集体诉讼，指控一家高端音像设备制造商刺探客户的听力习惯。 在给他 QuietComfort 35 耳机支付350美元后，凯尔Zak，本案首席原告，遵循 Bose 的建议 “在耳机之外得到最多”将连接应用程序下载到他的智能手机。在注册过程中，他提供了自己的姓名、电子邮件地址和耳机序列号。就像我们大多数人一样，他不假思索地就把信息提交了。这款应用还增加了一些功能，比如可以定制耳机的降噪级别。但这款应用还会追踪用户收听的音乐、播客和其他Bose音频，并将这些信息出售给各种第三方，包括一家名为 Segment.io 的数据挖掘公司，从而侵犯了隐私权。诉讼提出后不久，Bose 发表了一份公司声明予以回应:“我们将通过法律体系打击针对我们的煽动性、误导性指控。”对我们来说，没有什么比您的信任更重要。我们不知疲倦地工作，以赚取和保持它，并已超过50年。从未改变,永远不会。”

Regardless of the final legal outcome, the Bose case sparked further questions about the ethics of data collection. The fact is, many companies are not transparent about the data they take and what they are doing with it, or clear about how they monetize our personal information. And this applies to everything from coffee machines to headphones, running shoes to even sex toys. In 2017, We-Vibe paid more than $3.75 million to resolve privacy claims regarding vibrators remotely controlled with a ‘connect lover’ smartphone app. The sex toys were secretly collecting customer data, including highly intimate details such as the date and time of each use, temperature settings and what vibration intensity and mode users selected–all of which were linked to owners’ personal email addresses. What if the data was hacked? Do we want companies (or even governments) to know how we spend our most personal time and the details of our orgasms? In April 2017, another smart sex toy faced a massive security glitch over intimate surveillance. Svakom Siime Eye, a $249 app-enabled vibrator, has a tiny built-in camera designed for either private live-streaming or to ‘know the subtle changes inside of your private areas’. The default password on the device is 88888888. If it is not reset, the device can be easily hacked. What’s more, the manufacturer, Standard Innovations, can geolocate whenever the vibrator is in use.

不管最终的法律结果如何，Bose 案件引发了对数据收集的伦理道德的进一步质疑。事实上，许多公司并不攻来展示他们所获取的数据以及他们如何使用这些数据，也不公开展示他们如何将我们的个人信息货币化。这适用于从咖啡机到耳机，从跑鞋到性玩具的所有东西。2017 年 We-Vibe 支付超过 375万 美元来解决关于能通过智能手机应用“连接爱人”远程控制的振动器的隐私指控。性爱玩具被秘密收集客户数据,包括高度亲密的细节,如每次使用的日期和时间,温度设置和振动强度和模式——用户的所有选择都会与业主的个人电子邮件地址相关练。如果数据被黑了呢？我们想让公司(甚至政府)知道我们如何度过最私密的时间，以及我们高潮的细节吗？2017年4月，另一款智能性玩具在亲密监控方面出现了重大安全故障。Svakom Siime Eye是一款售价 249 美元、支持应用程序的振动器，内置一个微型摄像头，专为私人直播或“了解私人区域的细微变化”而设计。设备上的默认密码是88888888。如果没有重置，设备很容易被黑客攻击。更重要的是,制造商——‘标准创新’,可以在振动器在使用的时候进行物理定位。

Smart phones and computer webcams can be co-opted for commercial and nefarious purposes. Next in line as potential spies are the digital voice assistants such as Amazon’s Echo smart speaker called Alexa, now entering millions of our homes. Her tagline is, fittingly, ‘Just Ask’. The artificially intelligent assistant is happy to help with all kinds of requests such as ‘Alexa, what’s on my calendar today?’ or ‘Alexa, play the Coldplay song I like.’ And, of course, she is especially handy in buying things–from Amazon, that is. But what if she was asked to assist with, say, a murder trial?

智能手机和电脑网络摄像头可以用于商业和邪恶的目的。下一个潜在的间谍是数字语音助手，比如亚马逊(Amazon)名为 Alexa 的 Echo 智能扬声器，它正在进入千家万户。她的口号恰如其分地是“只管问”。这个人工智能助手很乐意帮助处理各种各样的请求，比如“Alexa，今天我的日历上有什么?”或者“Alexa，播放我喜欢的酷玩乐队的歌。”当然，她在买东西上尤其得心应手——没错，就是从亚马逊买东西。但是，如果她被要求协助，比如说，一桩谋杀案的审判呢?

In November 2015, Victor Collins, a police officer from Arkansas, was found floating dead in the hot tub of his friend James Andrew Bates, who became a suspect. Two years later, attorney Nathan Smith, the lead prosecutor in the first-degree murder trial, ordered Amazon to hand over the audio recordings from Bates’s digital assistant, used in the Echo speakers in his home. While it’s unlikely any alleged murderer would have asked, ‘Alexa, how do I strangle someone and hide a body?’ the prosecution felt the recording might provide valuable clues as to what happened at Bates’s house the night Collins was found dead.

2015年11月，来自阿肯色州的警官维克多柯林斯(Victor Collins)被发现死在朋友詹姆斯安德鲁贝茨(James Andrew Bates)的热水浴缸里，贝茨后来成为嫌疑人。两年后，一级谋杀审判的首席检察官、律师内森·史密斯(Nathan Smith)命令亚马逊交出贝茨的电子助理的录音，这些录音用在贝茨家里的 Echo 扬声器上。虽然不太可能有任何被指控谋杀的人会问，“亚历克斯，我怎么勒死一个人，藏起一具尸体?”检方认为，这段录音可能提供了有关柯林斯被发现死亡当晚贝茨家发生什么的宝贵线索。

Amazon’s attorneys contended the digital assistant has First Amendment rights protecting information gathered and sent by the device. Bates, however, told Amazon it could hand over the information. Maybe he believed it would prove his innocence, although it’s also possible Bates thought the Echo device was only recording snippets of audio during the few seconds during and after ‘hearing’ a command. Aside from the other issues, the case raises a key question: how can you know when your always-connected digital assistant is recording what you say?

亚马逊的律师辩称，数字助理拥有《第一修正案》(First Amendment)赋予的保护该设备收集和发送信息的权利。然而，贝茨告诉亚马逊，他们可以提供这些信息。也许贝茨相信这能证明他的清白，但也有可能贝茨认为回声装置只是在“听到”命令的几秒钟内或之后录下一些音频片段。除了其他问题，这个案子还提出了一个关键问题:你怎么能知道一直在线的数字助理什么时候在记录你说的话呢?

And it is not just tech companies that are in on this. Governments around the world are already engaged in the business of monitoring, rating and labelling their own citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) is not the only government digital eye in the US following the movements of citizens’ lives. In 2015, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) quietly proposed the idea of expanding the PreCheck background checks (the ones that give you faster transport through security) to include social media records, location data and purchase history. The idea was scrapped after heavy criticism but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. Indeed, in February 2017, President Trump put forward a proposal to force some people entering the country to hand over their social media passwords for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and others, so authorities could view their internet activity. The US government has said the ‘extreme vetting’ rule will apply predominantly to travellers from the seven Muslim countries–Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya–named in the controversial travel ban. ‘We want to get on their social media, with passwords: what do you do, what do you say?’ Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told the Homeland Security Committee. ‘If they don’t want to cooperate, then you don’t come in.’

参与其中的不只是科技公司。世界各国政府已经在从事监测、评价和给本国公民贴标签的工作。美国国家安全局(NSA)并不是美国唯一一家追踪公民生活动态的政府数字眼。2015年，美国交通安全管理局(TSA)悄悄提出了扩大 PreCheck 背景检查(通过安全检查可以让你更快地出行)的想法，将社交媒体记录、位置数据和购买历史记录包括在内。这个想法被取消后遭到了严厉的批评,但这并不意味着它死了。事实上，在2017年2月，特朗普总统提出了一项建议，要求一些进入美国的人交出他们在Facebook、Twitter、谷歌+、Instagram、YouTube、LinkedIn 等社交媒体上的密码，这样当局就可以查看他们的互联网活动。美国政府表示，这项“极端审查”规定将主要适用于来自伊拉克、伊朗、叙利亚、也门、索马里、苏丹和利比亚这七个穆斯林国家的游客。“我们想用密码登录他们的社交媒体:你做什么，你说什么?”国土安全部部长凯利(John Kelly)对国土安全委员会说。如果他们不想合作,那么你别进来。”

If you are still unconvinced that privacy is not merely in peril but already extinct, consider this: Uber has a tool it rather ominously calls ‘God View’. Until recently, it allowed all employees to access and track where and when any Uber rider travels to or from, in real time and without obtaining any kind of permission. Running late to a meeting? Uber could know why. Shockingly, the company could analyse data to predict ‘Rides of Glory’ (RoG), the term used in a blog by an Uber data scientist to describe tracking sexual rendezvous. Those were customers Uber called ‘RoGers’, who booked rides between 10 p.m. and 4.00 a.m. on weekend nights, and then took a second ride home a few hours later from the previous drop-off point, presumably after one-night stands.

如果你仍然不相信隐私不仅处于危险之中，而且已经灭绝，那么考虑一下这个:Uber有一种工具，被它不祥地称为“上帝视角”(God View)。直到最近，它还允许所有员工在没有获得任何许可的情况下，实时访问和跟踪优步乘客往返的地点和时间。去开会迟到了吗？Uber可能知道原因。令人震惊的是，优步可以通过分析数据来预测“荣耀之旅”(RoG)，这个词是优步的一位数据科学家在博客中用来描述追踪性约会的。那些是被 Uber 称作 ‘RoGers’的客户，他们订了在周末晚上 10 点和凌晨 4 点之间的车，然后在从前一辆车下车后上了另一辆车，大概在一夜情之后。

In 2014, Emil Michael, a senior vice president at Uber, took the company’s ‘God View’ one step further. He suggested using the tool to monitor the rider logs and location of a Pando Daily reporter called Sara Lacey, an outspoken Uber critic who had recently accused Uber of ‘sexism and misogyny’. What’s more, the executive boasted at a dinner party attended by the likes of actor Ed Norton and Arianna Huffington that the company should spend a million dollars to use location data to dig up dirt on other journalists who had been critical of Uber to silence them. His proposal was to look into ‘your personal lives, your families’, and give the media a taste of its own medicine. The Sara Lacey incident resulted in a lawsuit led by the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, that was settled in January 2016. ‘This settlement protects the personal information of Uber riders from potential abuse by company executives and staff, including the real-time locations of riders in an Uber vehicle,’ said Attorney General Schneiderman. As part of the settlement, Uber had to pay a measly $20,000 in fines and ‘God View’ can now only be used by a select number of ‘designated employees’ and only for ‘legitimate business purposes’. Phew, problem solved. Hardly.

2014年，优步高级副总裁埃米尔·迈克尔(Emil Michael)将该公司的“上帝视角”又向前推进了一步。他建议使用该工具监控《潘多日报》(Pando Daily)记者萨拉•莱西(Sara Lacey)的骑行记录和位置。莱西直言不讳地批评优步，最近指责优步存在“性别歧视和厌女症”。此外，在演员爱德华诺顿(Ed Norton)和阿里安娜赫芬顿(Arianna Huffington)等人出席的晚宴上，优步高管夸口称，该公司应该花费100万美元，利用位置数据挖掘其他批评优步的记者的丑闻，让他们闭嘴。他的建议是调查“你的个人生活，你的家庭”，让媒体尝尝自己的药。萨拉·莱西事件导致纽约总检察长埃里克·施奈德曼(Eric Schneiderman)提起诉讼，并于2016年1月达成和解。美国总检察长施奈德曼(Schneiderman)说，这项和解协议保护了优步乘客的个人信息不受公司高管和员工可能滥用的侵害，包括优步车辆上乘客的实时位置。作为和解协议的一部分，优步不得不支付微不足道的2万美元罚款，而“上帝视角”现在只能被选定的“指定员工”使用，而且只能用于“合法的商业目的”。唷,问题解决了。几乎没有。

We already live in a world of predictive algorithms that determine if we are a profitable customer, a threat, a risk, a good citizen and even if we are a trustworthy person. We are getting closer to the Chinese system–the expansion of credit scoring into life scoring–even if we don’t know it is happening. Photos, books, music, films, friendships and even money have been digitized. We are now in the early stages of digitizing identity and reputation.

我们已经生活在一个预测算法的世界里，这些算法决定了我们是否是一个有利可图的客户、一个威胁、一个风险、一个好公民，甚至我们是否是一个值得信赖的人。我们正在接近中国的体系——将信用评分扩大到生活评分——即使我们不知道它正在发生。照片、书籍、音乐、电影、友谊甚至金钱都被数字化了。我们现在正处于身份和声誉数字化的早期阶段。

So are we inexorably headed for a future where we will all be branded online and data-mined? It’s certainly trending that way. Barring some kind of mass citizens’ revolt to wrench back privacy and personal information, we are entering an age where an individual’s actions will be judged by standards they can’t control and where that judgement cannot be erased. The consequences are not only troubling; they are permanent. Forget the right to delete and the right to be forgotten. Forget being young and foolish.

那么，我们是否正不可阻挡地走向一个人人都将被评分、被挖掘数据的未来?它肯定是朝那个方向发展的。除非有某种大规模的公民反抗，以夺回隐私和个人信息，否则我们正在进入这样一个时代:个人的行为将受到他们无法控制的标准的评判，而这种评判是无法抹去的。其后果不仅令人不安;他们是永久性的。忘记删除的权利和被遗忘的权利吧。忘记永远保持年轻并犯错吧。

It’s why, at the very least, we urgently need to find a way to create forgiveness for moments of madness, ineptitude or cheating. Deletion should not be outlawed. Human beings, with all our imperfections, are so much more than a number.

这就是为什么，至少，我们迫切需要找到一种方法，为疯狂、无能或欺骗的时刻创造宽恕。不应禁止删除。人类，与我们所有的不完美，远远不是一个数字能囊括的。

While it might be too late to stop this new era, we do have choices and rights we need to be exerting now. For one thing, we need to be able to rate the raters. In his book The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly describes a future where the watchers and the watched will transparently and ceaselessly track each other. ‘Our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon–or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers,’ he writes. ‘The first option is hell, the second redeemable.’

虽然现在阻止这个新时代可能为时已晚，但我们现在确实需要行使我们的选择和权利。首先，我们需要能够对评级者进行评级。凯文·凯利在他的《不可避免》一书中描述了这样一个未来:观察者和被观察者将透明地、不断地相互追踪。“我们现在的核心选择是让这个监控是一个秘密的,单向的原型圆形监狱，还是一个共同的,透明的“监督”包括监督观察者。”第一个选项是地狱,第二是可以挽救的。”

Our trust should start with individuals within government (or whichever organization is controlling the system). We need trustworthy mechanisms to make sure the ratings and data are used responsibly and with our permission. To trust the system, as we have seen, we need to reduce the unknowns. That means taking steps to reduce the opacity of the scoring algorithms. The argument against mandatory disclosures is that if you know what happens under the bonnet, the system becomes more vulnerable to being rigged or hacked. But if humans are being reduced to a rating that could have a significant impact on their lives, there must be full transparency in how the scoring works.

我们的信任应该从政府内部的个人(或任何控制系统的组织)开始。我们需要可靠的机制，以确保评级和数据被负责任地使用，并得到我们的许可。正如我们所见，要信任这个系统，我们需要减少未知因素。这意味着采取措施减少评分算法的不透明度。反对强制披露的理由是，如果你知道引擎盖下发生了什么，系统就更容易受到操纵或黑客攻击。但如果人类被降至一个可能对他们的生活产生重大影响的等级，那么评分的工作方式必须完全透明。

In China, it seems likely that certain citizens, such as government officials and business leaders, will be deemed to be above the system. What will be the public reaction when their unfavourable actions don’t seem to affect their score? We could see a Panama Papers 3.0 for reputation fraud.

在中国，某些公民，如政府官员和商界领袖，似乎将被视为凌驾于制度之上。当他们的不良行为似乎不会影响他们的分数时，公众会有什么反应?我们可以看到巴拿马文件3.0的声誉欺诈。

It is still too early to know how a culture of constant monitoring plus rating will turn out. What will happen when these systems, charting the social, moral and financial history of an entire population, come into full force? How much further will privacy and freedom of speech (long under siege in China) be eroded? Who will decide which way the system goes? These are questions we all need to consider, and very soon. Today China, tomorrow a place near you. The real questions about the future of trust are not technological or economic; they are ethical.

现在要知道一种持续监控加评级的文化将如何发展，还为时过早。当这些描绘整个人口的社会、道德和金融史的体系全面生效时，将会发生什么?隐私和言论自由(在中国长期受到攻击)还会受到多大程度的侵蚀?谁来决定系统的走向?这些都是我们都需要考虑的问题，而且很快就要考虑。今天的中国，你明天的处境。关于信任的未来，真正的问题不是技术或经济，而是道德。

Indeed, if we are not vigilant, distributed trust could become networked shame. And life will become one endless popularity contest, with us all feverishly vying for the highest ratings that only a few can attain.

事实上，如果我们不保持警惕，分布式信任可能会成为网络的耻辱。生活将变成一场无止境的人气竞赛，我们都在狂热地争夺只有少数人能获得的最高收视率。