New app shames debtors in China

● If you have ever wondered whether your neighbours pay their bills or whether a deadbeat debtor lurked on your street, China has developed an app to satisfy your curiosity.

The “deadbeat map” app with WeChat, China’s popular social media service, claims it can reveal all bad debtors residing within 500m of the phone. It was launched just before the lunar new year holiday, a time when people are supposed to have discharged their debts to begin the year with a clean slate.

The point of the app is to name and shame people who have not paid up, according to its developer, the People’s Court in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing.

“The app puts the debtors under the spotlight of their social circle, and it will help the court solve the problem of enforcement,” the Hebei Daily, a local newspaper, quoted court spokesperson Zhang Xuan as saying.

The court “wants to take advantage of pressure from society and from people who know the debtors”.

For now, the app works only for claims recognised by the Hebei court. But it nonetheless falls within a series of innovations in China that have raised concerns over the dystopian use of technology.

From ubiquitous cameras to monitoring of social media and to the intended roll-out of a social credit system to rate people’s behaviour, China has become a testing ground for new technologies that allow states to control their citizens.

Chinese media have hyped the app, along with many other innovations that display the country’s hi-tech prowess, claiming that it revealed any debtors that wandered into the phone’s range. The English-language China Daily reported that the app would encourage whistleblowers to expose those bad debtors who appeared to have the capacity to pay.

Tests by the Financial Times, however, suggested that the app was not as omnipotent as claimed. But it still revealed enough to embarrass anyone caught up in its database. The app displayed the full name, a partially redacted ID number and a portion of the registered residential addresses of people who had lost civil claims cases in Hebei province courts.

“It oversteps the line between privacy and legal punishment,” warned Philip Liu of Peking University, an expert on China’s efforts to develop credit scoring.

Liu, who believes the debtors’ database should be available to court officials and police but not the general public, noted that a counter-trend to protect personal data and privacy was also being developed in China. The government has proposed data protection guidelines in response to scandals arising from the sale of private information, even as it steps up its surveillance capability.

Apps such as the “deadbeat map” appear to fall into a grey zone of information that can be released.