This is worse than the Chinese social credit score system, in my opinion, because:

- It's completely arbitrary and opaque. - It's irreversible.

With the CSSSS at least you get a notification of what you did, and you can revert it by "behaving".

The Chinese system also applies to companies and government offices. One could imagine in a similar system that Airbnb would get penalized for too many unjustified bans. Maybe this would be a solution to the robo-ban problem that we have with many large SV companies? Make the cost of a mistake higher?

Could you explain why captcha is controlling our digital lives? I mean sure they can force me to find a boat on every picture but other than that they don't really control me as far as I know.

If the CAPTCHA provider deems you unworthy to proceed, the fadeout delay after each action will get excessively long, and the number of CAPTCHAs you have to complete will just keep increasing without bound, until you give up.

They add so much noise to the picture, too. It can take over a minute to solve a single captcha. The funny thing is that by doing this, they're punishing the poor offshore workers I hired to solve captchas for me in the first place.

I have experienced this. On VPN I have to select specific countries in order to get through CAPTCHAs. Some countries no issue, some countries it's CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA until I give up.

The point of captcha isn't that you find boats on pictures. It's that you score high enough on some opaque metric.

That's why captchas come in different forms: math challenges, sound recognition, snooping on clicks, as well as captchas that will keep serving you challenges forever without ever accepting your answer.

If you can't hit the score, you won't be allowed in.

Test it for yourself:

1. Install Firefox

2. Open Firefox and solve a ReCaptcha

3. Install Chromium

4. Open Chromium and solve a ReCaptcha

Notice the difference between Firefox and Chromium?

Google's ReCaptcha is gracious with Chromium/Google Chrome. You can even make mistakes and it still valid. With Firefox (and maybe other) browsers on the other hand... why not increasing the difficulty/challenge for them? -.-

Companies do use consumer scores under the innocuous term of Digital Safety and Trust to determine the service you receive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...

Non paywall: https://archive.ph/FKQ6d

The article does mention use cases for fraud, however it also states that the consumer score can

...determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. A low score sends you to the back of the queue; high scores get you elite treatment.

The article also mentions usage by social / dating applications such as OkCupid, which would indicate that a score can have an impact on your social life.

On one hand, I do understand the need for fraud mitigation. On the other hand, I've had to deal with the negative consequences of incorrect data provided by companies such as LexisNexis, how you can't fix it, and the impacts it has.