“Deadbeat Debtors Near me?” China has a WeChat App Map for That
Will privacy become a privilege?
The Higher People’s Court in the province of Hebei made an app. The app alerts you when people who fail to honour their credit obligations are within 500 yards. The app went live on Jan 14th 2019.
My first question was WTF China?
Here’s the thing. No one is the villain in their own story so its worth trying to understand what they thing this will achieve. Somewhere in China a group of people thought that this was a good idea and signed off on it.
Why expose this data?
China has a debt problem. Merrill Lynch estimated that China had roughly $14 billion in bond defaults in 2018, nearly triple the number in 2017.
Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, the Supreme People’s Court, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), told authorities to complete provincial-level online platforms by the end of this year and to make the public aware of these websites within two years. — Xinhua 2017–10–10
So representatives from the government, the courts and the banks think this is a good idea.
