National Credit System

The logo of the proposed National Credit System.

The National Credit System is a proposed Caputian Government initiative for developing a national reputation system.

Government planners have reported that it will assign a credit rating to every Caputian citizen or resident based on government data about their economic and social status. The system will also include ratings for businesses that operate in the Caputian marketplace.

Critics say it is a mass surveillance tool, using big data analysis technology to give citizens ratings based on their spending behavior, cultural choices, social media and internet profiles, internet browsing history, and text messaging.

History

In 1657, Prime Minister Christophe Landry organized the Council for Internal Affairs as an "Executive Private Commission" on the topics of national defense and economic security. Though statute does not provide for the creation or regulation of these bodies, it is understood that they are advisory bodies that Prime Ministers may convene formally through Order-in-Council or informally through other means. These may be organized on any topic or agenda, composed of bureaucrats, public officials, and members of the public. The latter were usually experts and stakeholders from the public on the topic of the Commission.

Among the first proposals discussed was the establishment of a national credit system to establish a national financial credit scoring system that was fair and trusted by financial institutions in Caputia. The discussion within the Council on the matter continued through much of 1658, and concluded with Paper 1, a government brief on a proposed National Credit System.

The Paper, however, proposed a broader system that would extend the credit scoring system to other areas of government regulation from contract enforcement to food safety, corruption, and environmental protection. The first years immediately after the end of the Hammish Civil War had seen prominent commercial Ponzi schemes collapse, war-related environmental disasters ravage the country, and serious food safety crises. This eroded the confidence and trust of many Caputians on the nascent Landry administration.

In an effort to shore up trust and improve the economy, Paper 1 sought to reassure Caputian citizens and ensure that financial decisions could be made based on data and not arbitrary whims. It proposed to link public and private data on financial and social behavior across Caputia, use the data to evaluate the behavior of individuals and organizations, and punish or reward them according to certain agreed-upon standards of appropriate conduct.

In 1658, a Public Report on the matter from the Prime Minister's Office declared: “We must strengthen society’s credit awareness and constitute a social credit system with morality as its support, property rights as its foundation, and law as its guarantor.”

iHonest

iHonest is a pilot program based partially on Paper 1 that was launched in the city of Zalae in 1659 by the government of the Royal District and the Caputian National Defense Laboratory.

The iHonest logo is widely known in Caputia.

The pilot program is based around an application that can be used on computers, tablets, mobile phones, and through public access digital platforms that use facial-recognition software to browse government records and rates users accordingly. It included a payment tool called LaurelPay that would report financial data to the system to create a credit file and report that would evaluate individual's creditworthiness. LaurelPay also allows users to transfer money to others using the service using the application and includes social networking interaction. When a user makes a transaction, the transaction details (stripped of the payment amount) are shared on a user's "news feed" and to the user's network of friends. The application also allows users to link documents verifying their identities such as passports, birth certificates, and forms of ID issued by a state or local government.

iHonest succeeded in quickly increasing its user base, reaching up to 100,000 participants in the city of Zalae and its environs by 1661. LaurelPay became a popular way for friends to quickly split bills, whether that is for movies, dinner, rent, tickets, or anything else. While the transactions can be made private, most users have kept the default setting and do not change the privacy settings.

In 1662, experiencing great success with iHonest, the city of Zalae granted a large contract to Sarbanes-Lopez CyberSecurity to update the application and aggressively expand data collection. Investigative journalism from local papers revealed that the newly built application by Sarbanes-Lopez CyberSecurity collected information gathered from the internet behavior of its users and used it in its ratings system. This has been denied by the government of the city of Zalae.

Despite these revelations, the governments of the states of San Luis, Haifa, Hamland, and Northpass came to adopt and implement their own successful versions of iHonest at their government levels by the end of 1662 to create financial credit registries that could be combined to form a national credit registry.

All iHonest applications include direct links to the Zalae Gazette, and to any relevant state or local government gazettes used to disseminate important information, notices, and documents based on the user's location.

The System

Paper 1 identifies four areas of focus for the National Credit System: "honesty in government affairs", "commercial integrity", "societal integrity", and "judicial credibility".

A national system requires extraordinary coordination between parties inside and outside government, parties that have conflicting objectives, protect access to their own data, and do not generally trust each other. Considerable hype among planners and other government officials has formed around data generation and tracking through facial recognition and the use of blockchain to create secure, transparent decentralized databases. Fundamental challenges still remain, mainly around privacy.

As of 1663, there is still no central government repository for receiving, standardizing, managing, coordinating, and analyzing the vast volumes of data from industry and government. Companies also currently have fewer incentives to share their data entirely with the government, due to its tremendous commercial and competitive value. Government ministries at the central and local levels often resist sharing data, because control over data comes with precious political power and influence. The lack of even basic data sharing is one of the most overlooked roadblocks to constructing the system.

As of 1663, very little firm information is available about how this system might work in practice at a national level.

See also

• Council for Internal Affairs