Open Sesame!

Open Sesame!

Threatpost. Inc

Imagine if a company like Amazon swallowed eBay, Apple News, Groupon, American Express, Citibank and Youtube -- that is Alipay. Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is sometimes called a super app. The app’s home screen is neatly organized with icons, some of which are entirely third-party companies such as Airbnb, Uber or Uber’s Chinese rival Didi.

Through the eyes of Lazarus Liu, we get an inside look of how Alipay affects one’s lifestyle in China. When he moved back to China in 2015, after studying logistics in the United Kingdom for three years, he noticed the drastic change. Society had converted into a cashless economy where everyone paid for everything with their phones. One day, after watching a woman his mother’s age pull out her phone to pay for her groceries, he decided to sign up.

The first step was to get an Alipay ID, in which Liu had to input his cell phone number and scan his national ID card. He did so reflexively as Alipay has created a reputation for trust and reliability with its

slogan as an accurate gist: “Trust makes it simple.” Liu found the app so convenient that he began using it multiple times a day. Alipay helped him pay for his breakfast through a food delivery app. His parking could be paid for through Alipay’s My Car feature, in which he had to add his driver’s license, as well as the engine number of his Audi. The options were limitless. He booked doctors’ appointments on the app, allowing him to skip the infamous lines of China’s hospitals. The mobile payment services of Alipay no longer required Liu to bring his wallet when he left the house.

One day, a new icon appeared on Liu’s Alipay home screen. It was called Zhima Credit (Sesame Credit). The name, like that of Alipay’s parent company, emblemizes the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, in which the words “open sesame” magically unsealed a cave full of treasure. When Liu tapped the icon, he was greeted by an image of the Earth. The text underneath read, “Zhima Credit is the embodiment of personal credit. It uses big data to conduct an objective assessment. The higher the score, the better your credit.” The clean white characters beneath read, “Start my credit journey.”

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The idea of Zhima Credit spawned in 2013 when Ant Financial executives retreated to the mountains outside Hangzhou to discuss new products. The executives realized that they could use the datacollecting power of Alipay to calculate a credit score based on an individual’s activities. “It was a very natural process,” says You Xi, a Chinese business reporter who detailed this pivotal meeting, “If you have payment data, you can assess the credit of a person,” and so Ant Financial began the process of creating a score that would be “credit for everything in your life,” as You explains it.

Ant Financial was not the only body that believed in using data to measure people’s worth. In 2014, the Chinese government announced it was developing a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly called for the establishment of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses and even government officials. For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to incentivize people toward specific behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party.

Shortly after, Ant Financial stated in a press release that the company planned “to help build a social integrity system.” The government has already cooperated with the Chinese government in one major way: It has integrated a blacklist of more than six million people who have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s database. According to Xinhua, the state news agency, this union of big tech and big government has helped courts punish more than 1.21 million defaulters, who opened their Zhima Credit one day to find their scores plunging. Those guilty would be reprimanded by the law. The Zhima Credit general manager avowed, “There should be consequences for dishonest behavior.”

The service tracks your behavior on the app to arrive at a score between 350 and 950 and offers perks and rewards to those with good scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not only whether you repay your bills but also what you buy, what degrees you hold, and what your friends’ scores are. For those with good behavior, Zhima Credit offers perks through cooperation agreements that Ant Financial has signed with a number of companies and institutions. Shenzhou Zuche, a car rental company, allows people with credit scores over 650 to rent a car without a deposit. In exchange for this vetting, Shenzhou Zuche shares data so that if a Zhima Credit user crashes one of the rental company’s cars and refuses to pay up, that detail is fed back into his or her credit score. For a while, people with scores over 750 could even skip the security check line at Beijing Capital Airport. The good scorers were moving without obstruction. A threat hung over the rest.

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Signing up for Alipay and Zhima Credit is completely voluntary. However, the benefits are undeniably attractive and entice those who desire to live an easy and luxurious life. The app holds everyone accountable for their social and financial behavior with a goal of creating a more amicable society. Such privileges also entail the risk of having one’s privacy exposed; it all depends on what you care about.

https://qz.com/1097766/i-fixed-my-poor-sesame-credit-score-bybeing-a-more-loyal-user-of-alibabas-wallet-app-alipay-in-china/

https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/