Travel restrictions or ineligibiliy for universities. Public shaming via automated voice messages or displays, denouncing you as dishonest. You don't think that's worse?
Also note that in Germany, the right to be informed about any data companies may have on you has been law for a while. The EU-wide General Data Protection Regulation becomes enforceable next week.
Freedom of movement and GDPR are good things. The EU is not (yet) China. But the social credit score is not the bogeyman people make it out to be - or, to the extent that it is, it's already here.
In the West, are those things engineered by the government on a mass scale to coerce political support for the regime and silence dissent?
I've never understood this American notion that just because a private company is doing something that makes it fine. If you can't get a loan and can't find out why, what difference does it make whether it was the government or a private entity that blocked you?
> Also, you avoid even having a credit score if you just pay cash for everything.
Sure, but at that point you're unable to participate in much of society, just like someone without a social credit score.
A lot, actually. It might help you to understand if you realize it's not really about the loan. It's about the political control that such opaque denials can be used to implement. A private company, especially a large public one, has a lot fewer incentives for exerting political control over its customers than an authoritarian government over its people. The private company actually has a lot of incentives for not doing so, since that kind of thing can alienate customers.
You're reaching too far for an equivalence. Yes they have "deeper," more esoteric interests, but having them limited to those rather than supporting a party-regime is a far better situation.
Private company credit scores are better than government social credit scores, even though they're not totally neutral in idealistic way. The difference is big enough for them to be entirely different animals.
You seem to be confused about the salient differences between the social credit system and Western credit scores. Focusing on the fact that you can be "denied...for no clear reason or way to appeal" to draw an equivalence entirely misses the point.
What's novel and scary about the social credit system is that political actions like criticizing the government or associating with activists could hurt your score. It's not scoped to financial activity like western systems. If I have a low FICO score, I'm 100% certain that it's not because I didn't vote for Trump.
What gives you that certainty?
I worked on this stuff in the finance industry a few years back. Even at that stage we were taking any available data and throwing it into opaque machine learning models, and using those to make lending decisions. There was no nefarious intent, but it's not like we had (or cared to have) any way to exclude political affiliation effects either.