If these numeric scores are affecting search results, recommendations, when sharing stuff, etc etc, there's no question that it will affect societal discourse. These hidden "algorithms" (as in the popular term) and fraud prevention systems are so far from being understood that it may be too late to reverse it when we realize what's happened.
It seemed somewhat legitimate for a small free to use site mods to try to not get their whole life sunk by dealing with trolls, but if the same behavior is applied to giant entities who have much more incentives to do it at scale, it becomes a different issue altogether. Hidden restrictions on search results or other functionalities would be distopian and something I hope doesn’t get accepted as standard.
Not sure being corporate centric makes this problem any worse? If you had other kinds of organisation, you'd still have to deal with abuse and fraud? Any people doing weird, unusual stuff, look inherently more suspicious. That's a fact of life in meatspace, too.
There might be some utopian, ideal way to organise activity so that non-mainstream stuff ain't suspicious.
But I would count that as a great feature of that ideal way; not as a deficiency in the corporate way. Just because this deficiency of the corporate way seems to be a common deficiency of most means of organisation that have been tried.
(Keep in mind, this isn't all or nothing. Softening the tendency might be enough of a relief, without having to eliminate it completely.)
Thanks!
> Not sure being corporate centric makes this problem any worse? If you had other kinds of organisation, you'd still have to deal with abuse and fraud?
I think it's definitely not unique to big corps, but an emergent property of a distributed and homogenous system of self interested agents, probably. It feels very game theoretical, at least. What's clear is these systems are becoming ubiquitous rapidly.
Anyway, if my Google account gets locked today, for whatever reason, I am very seriously screwed. Google's human appeal process is best-effort at best, I know people personally who have been locked out for life. Now, I have the luxury to blame myself because I should have bought a domain and so on, but society at large doesn't have that foresight/insight.
Not sure the homogenity is necessary?
To an extent, the market delivers what people are demanding.
For most people, Google's package of cheap or even free services with minimal hassle in the common case, but almost no recourse in bad cases, is compelling.
And for many it's a step up from having everything locally: I'd bet that more people lose their local data than get locked out of Google?
Oh, nice catch, I actually meant to write heterogeneous.
> I'd bet that more people lose their local data than get locked out of Google?
Probably. There's definitely some low hanging fruit/middle ground though. We desperately need to have ownership of the address itself, so we can transfer to different providers. Either with your own domain, or a domain provided by a truly neutral party, similar to phone numbers.
Unfortunately google doesn't have the support infrastructure like a bank to do recoveries.
It's not so much a social credit score to fear rather than privacy. Any site using cloudflare or Google knows where you're going and what your doing and if they don't then, access denied.
They know so much more than your innocent mind will want to admit.
In my book you’re never supposed to fully block a session because of the score, there needs to be a (potentially burdensome) way to prove the score wrong. Blocking a browser should be out of question.