From social media to social credit: the creeping convergence of U.S. and Chinese citizen profiling

How to protect your phone at the US border is now an ongoing trope of many tech blogs, travel websites, and consumer magazines.

Beyond the quite obvious geopolitical implications, we see in real-time a core transformation of how the US deals with online and social media privacy (or lack thereof). We also recently saw American AI tech companies pleading that copyright laws shouldn't concern them because... because they essentially need all our data really badly. Not to mention the now vintage attitude of companies such as Meta and Google regarding our private lives.

In 2017, I described how the US internet ("RED 1") was steadily disconnecting itself from Europe after losing China—disconnecting in terms of laws, rules, and behaviors.

[US] Social networks have been built by giving a largely free pass on business ethics and plain decency for digital entrepreneurs (Section 230). Strangely enough, no one outside of the US bats an eyelash for now.

We are now there.

The most casual advice you will read is along those lines:

There are two ways to approach device privacy for border crossings. One is to start with a clean slate, purchasing a phone for the purpose of traveling or wiping and repurposing your old phone—if it still receives software updates. (...) The other approach you can take to protecting your device during border crossings is to modify your primary smartphone before travel. This involves removing old photos and messages and storing them somewhere else, cleaning out nonessential apps, and either removing some apps altogether or logging out of them with your main accounts and logging back in with travel accounts. - Wired

If this is only for non-US citizens, still, and is mostly a concern at borders, the next step will be some form of social monitoring and scoring. Not exactly like China in terms of technology and implementation, but exactly like China in terms of spirit and objectives.

I'm not an activist or heavily involved in these matters, mind you. However, from an innovation perspective, this type of market change is not very reversible. When this behaviour is activated, the whole culture changes around it, and these changes linger. Whether the current craziness in the US administration is stopped, quenched, or slowed down, the line has moved forever on what is acceptable and what is not.

The US tech market shifting from a soft to a hard surveillance economy at a global scale will have significant ripple effects on how to sell anything in this market, and export to it or import for it.

Down the line, car manufacturers just like social media moguls will have to make decisions on their software and how driving data is used to report 'bad' or 'good' citizens...

We are past the weak signal zone. The market has shifted.