Abstract
The social credit system aims to rank Chinese citizens, companies, organizations and government entities by their trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is awarded as credit points based on compliance with legal, moral, and professional norms and standards. The accumulat-ed credit score can affect one’s possibilities in life, and the system aims to encourage trustwor-thiness by offering advantages to those with a high score, and similarly punish untrustworthi-ness by enforcing sanctions upon those with a lower score. This master’s thesis in human rights addresses a few key issues in the nexus of surveillance, technological development and human rights. A case study of China’s social credit system serves as an illustration of how the rela-tionship between human rights and surveillance is transformed through technological devel-opment. In particular, the thesis examines the rights to privacy and non-discrimination, in rela-tion to both surveillance, technological development, and the social credit system. Big data and Artificial Intelligence are particularly examined from a human rights perspective, and the thesis finds that these technologies substantially affect human rights challenges posed by sur-veillance. Further, the thesis seeks to understand the cultural and historical context within which the SCS has been implemented. The thesis finds that although the social credit system might be unique in its “gamification” of social life, developments in surveillance technology suggest that trends in the social credit system are present in several other parts of the world. As several researchers have noted high approval rates of the social credit system among Chi-nese citizens, this thesis attempts to explore the credit system in a nuanced and unbiased way, while considering which human rights implications it may have.