Two years ago, we reported that various cities throughout China are currently piloting a “social-credit system” that will assign a “personal citizen score” to every single person based on behavior such as spending habits, turnstile violations and filial piety.

Hangzhou’s local government is piloting a “social credit” system the Communist Party has said it wants to roll out nationwide by 2020, a digital reboot of the methods of social control the regime uses to avert threats to its legitimacy.

More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules. The effort echoes the dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on urban workers’ behavior.

In time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according to interviews with some architects of the system and a review of government documents.

Input data for the social credit system comes from a variety of government sources.

We warned at the time that this ‘score’ could be used to blacklist citizens from loans, jobs, or travel, for example.

Algorithms would use a range of data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which could then be used to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, or faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels.