Unless you are a Chinese national or serious gamer you have probably never heard of Sesame Credit, but you should at least be aware of what may become the greatest mass surveillance tool ever devised.
Sesame Credit is promoted as a credit scoring system constructed by Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of the Alibaba Group and is being used by Tencent Holdings, another massive Chinese company with interests in many services including social networks, web portals, e-commerce, and multiplayer online games.
Beneath the innocuous cover of ‘credit scoring’ lies, according to some, a massive tool for authoritarian oppression by ‘gamifying being a good corporate citizen’ that may easily be copied by Western countries when its true power becomes evident.
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