On May 25, 2022 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Michael Evans of Alibaba said they are working on a way to allow individual consumers to track their personal Carbon Footprint and help prevent Climate Change.
This is troubling on many levels. First for something like this to work, people would have to completely surrender their Privacy, just like they mention in the infamous "You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy" video. All of your transactions will have to be digital, and they will be fed into a Social Credit Score algorithm, which will then use "Nudge Theory" to guide you into making better purchases and lifestyle choices. The problem is these algorithms will be totally opaque, and you will have no idea if your data is being used adversarially. You also won’t have a way of knowing if it’s secretly being used to nudge you into behavior that matches someone else’s Political Agenda. Additionally you have no idea if your past purchase history will be used to punish you in the future. I know that seems like a lot to extract from a short video, but social credit score style algorithms are incredibly dangerous, and are extremely difficult to escape once they’re in place.
