Chinese Big Brother and implications for personal privacy - part II

Last week I wrote about the Chinese social credit system which raises a lot of questions about state surveillance and personal privacy. Despite of the recent attention given to the Chinese experiment there are multiple reasons why it’s unlikely to be replicated anywhere else. First is the significant ownership of the economy and most industries by the government through State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Chinese SOEs accounted for 15% of the Fortune Global 500 in 2014 and in 2013, they represented 96% of China’s top ten firms. Second is the depth of talent and skills that China possesses in the areas of technology, artificial intelligence and all things cyber – both in the public and private sector. Third, and probably the most critical, is the political regime and the power of the Communist Party of China. It doesn’t hurt that Xi Jinping is widely considered the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.

No other country in the world can claim the combination of these 3 factors. In terms of state ownership of the economy UAE, Russia, Indonesia and Malaysia are next in line with India slightly behind. From this list, Russia can definitely pull off a social credit system but with its Cold War mentality and intelligence background of its political elite, it has very different methods for keeping its citizens under control. The Deep State doesn’t need social credit.

India, however, is an interesting case. They actually are currently trying to push through their own human profiling system called Aadhaar. The government, of course, insists that Aadhaar is an identification tool aka Social Security in the US. India is no China though and the scheme was swiftly challenged in court for violating personal privacy and making India a surveillance state. There are currently 26 petitions before the Supreme Court challenging the scheme’s legality.

This brings us to a very exciting project in technological statecraft in the European Union. What makes it exciting is that it works and can be scaled across the union in due course. Not sure how many of you even heard of Estonia, but this country of 1.3 million people managed to design a fully functional digital society. All of the traditional services from voting to education, justice, health care and taxes, are linked through government’s data platform, X-Road. The beauty is that the information is not stored on X-road but lives, encrypted, on local servers. It operates through an ID card secured by a PIN and a digital signature. Digital security and integrity of the system is maintained by a blockchain technology called K.S.I. making tampering with records immediately noticeable, regardless of the source. But the most fascinating element of the Estonian system is that each individual owns their information and can grant or deny access to it. Finish recently started using X-Road and there’s some evidence that data can be linked across borders.

Cyber statecraft is, unfortunately, a necessary evil. We can only hope that more countries will opt for the Estonian model of digital empowerment rather than the Chinese model of digital suppression.