CHINA VOICES: Government open data credit service platforms in China

“AI gap” believers make much of China’s advantages in data, especially vis-a-vis the social credit system. Unbound by privacy norms, the story goes, the state is hoovering up data that will allow the world’s most populous nation to train AI on the world’s largest data sets. Beijing has repeatedly vowed to make social credit data available to the public.

But how much of this data is actually making it to users? Not too much, finds this week’s translation—a heavily abridged academic article from the Journal of Library and Information Science. Based on a review of data availability across local governments, the researcher finds that data provision is patchy and poorly standardized.

Like so many aspects of the social credit system, the objects in view may be further away than they appear.

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