The Chinese government announced the implementation of “social credit”, which is a way of tracking every move that every person makes and giving the people a “score” based on their movement. This would result in a “ranking” that would give them more freedoms or take freedoms, and possibly even their lives from them. Social credit type systems have already started seeing use in US prisons, and they are expected to greatly increase.
According to a recent article, a US government contractor TwoSense.Ai, has been contracted by the Defense Department to build an app that monitors every move and action of an employee through their phones, which is being used to develop “social credit” type profiles on each worker:
Forget Face ID: a collaboration between the Defense Department and a NY-based company called TWOSENSE.AI, has birthed an artificial intelligence algorithm that could be embedded in smartphones and will be able to identify the device owner by the way they talk, type, walk and even by how “they spend their free time”.
TWOSENSE.AI is working with the Department of Defense to build a SaaS product that could eventually replace access cards currently used to verify the identities of DOD employees when logging onto the department’s networks.
The AI constantly monitors the user’s behavior, including how they carry the device, type on it and even walk. The system then automatically verifies the user’s identity using these parameters, enabling them to work seamlessly on their secure network without having to login each time.
Similar to privacy-stripping developments in China, the system updates a “trust score” as it tracks these metrics, based on the algorithm’s level of confidence that the correct person is using the device. Jeremy Corey, chief of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Cyber Innovation Division said in May: “The score is checked to ensure it meets the desired threshold. This threshold is predetermined by the organization we are piloting our prototype with. This could be configured by the application owner, so long as it is within the authorizing official’s accepted level of risk.”
The $2.4 million contract was awarded in October through the Army’s other transaction authority, which allows certain agencies to sign contracts for advanced research outside of the scope of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. 75 prototypes were supposed to have already been delivered last year for testing, according to a technical director at DISA. After testing, the technology will be embedded in certain smartphones at the manufacturing level before being acquired by the DOD. We’re guessing this excludes Huawei from becoming a potential partner on the project.
Dr. Dawud Gordon, CEO of TWOSENSE.AI said: “Both DISA and TWOSENSE.AI believe that continuous authentication is the cornerstone of securing identity. Behavior-based authentication is invisible to the user, therefore it can be used continuously without creating any extra work.”
The project is reportedly working through “existing partnerships” between DISA, Qualcomm and Samsung. (source, source)
The last sentence of that article should be most concerning, specifically the mention of the companies Qualcomm and Samsung.
Qualcomm has a veritable monopoly on communications equipment for the trucking industry. Samsung, while not as extensive as Qualcomm, has a large share of the mobile phone market.
What this says is that this project is not being limited to merely government employees, but that it is going to pass to the consumer but most importantly, to the trucking and transportation industry next. Given the rise of cellular technology, the use of “just-in-time” shipping, and the vital role that cell phones play in facilitating communication between drivers, dispatch, and customers, and how Qualcomm is involved in this, one of the next major applications of social credit before it reaches consumers will be in the industrial and likely transportation sector. It will be a trend to watch for the future.