Big Data and the Illusion of Choice: Comparing the Evolution of India’s Aadhaar and China’s Social Credit System as Technosocial Discourses

Abstract

India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations and building the world’s biggest data sets in the process. However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to citizens registering with these projects. In this study, we analyze how the news media in India and China—crucial data intermediaries that shape public perceptions on data and technological practices—framed these projects since their inception. Topic modeling suggests news coverage in both nations disregards the public interest and focuses largely on how businesses can benefit from them. The media, institutionally and ideologically linked with governments and corporations, show little concern with violations of privacy and mass surveillance that these projects could lead to. We argue that this renders citizens structurally incapable of making a meaningful “choice” about whether or not to participate in such projects. Implications for various stakeholders are discussed.

Digital Government

“…Although envisioned and being built towards slightly different ends, the two systems, once completed and up and running provide the governments of the two most populous countries an unprecedented, real-time, and sweeping oversight of sensitive data on each and every single citizen. While India's Aadhaar (Hindi for "foundation") is a quasi-obligatory national registry with a unique personal 12-digit identifier, it also collects demographic data, and it stores fingerprints and iris scans for each registered individual [39]. By the end of 2017, the registry contained complete records for 99 percent of the 1.3 billion Indian citizens.…”

“…By the end of 2017, the registry contained complete records for 99 percent of the 1.3 billion Indian citizens. Provisions of social and financial services is linked to the citizens' Aadhaar IDs [39]. While the use of big data of this magnitude and completeness has been presented as a safeguard against crime and service abuses as well as a guarantor of individual identification and authentication in transactions of all kinds, it also widely opens the backdoor to total surveillance, real-time tracking, and eradication of major elements of individual privacy by government and by private firms, with which the data are shared.…”

Big Data Ethics and Politics: Toward New Understandings

“…As government and corporate services are increasingly provided through digital access, citizens often have little choice to get around of such national big data projects. Shahin and Zheng (2018) in their article “Big Data and the Illusion of Choice: Comparing the Evolution of India’s Aadhaar and China’s Social Credit System as Technosocial Discourses” conduct a comparative analysis and demonstrate political and ethical controversies related to national big data projects in two of the world’s most populous nations. Comparing how news media frame the emergence and evolution of India’s Aadhaar and China’s Social Credit System, Shahin and Zheng show that institutional and ideological links to the government and to corporations hinders Indian and Chinese news media in playing the critical role of watchdog.…”

“…Using a wide range of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, the six articles in this special issue show that it is important to understand, and to increase awareness among the public about, the biases and limitations inherent in big data analytics, especially because its predictive power is often taken for granted and used in justifying public policy. The six articles focus on different regions of the world, Hargittai (2018) analyzes data representative of the U.S. population; Frey, Patton, Gaskell, and McGregor (2018) study gang-related Twitter data in the United States; Popham, Lavoie, and Coomber (2018) draw from Canadian data from a community-driven discussion; Dubois, Gruzd, and Jacobson (2018) focus on Canadian citizens; and finally Shahin and Zheng (2018) compare media coverage in India and China. This wide regional coverage provides a range of perspectives that is much needed in debates around big data.…”

Benign dataveillance? Examining novel data-driven governance systems in India and China

“…The second governance model from China has a vision of a good society and a good citizen and the Chinese state is in the midst of creating a unified digital system to foster this vision. By 2020, China intends to institute the Social Credit System (Shahin and Zheng, 2018). By combining the citizens' financial records, online shopping data, social media behavior and employment history, the system will produce a 'social credit' score for each citizen.…”