Volume 21 · Number 1 · November 2019 economic econsoc.mpifg.de sociology _the european electronic newsletter 21.1 Note from the editor Content 1 Note from the editor The Brave New World The Brave New World of Big Data by Akos Rona-Tas of Big Data 4 Aadhaar: Uniquely Indian Dystopia? by Reetika Khera Akos Rona-Tas 13 Biometric IDs and the remaking of the Indian (welfare) state by Ursula Rao 22 Multiple social credit systems in China by Chuncheng Liu 33 Credit Scoring in the United States by Barbara Kiviat his issue is organized around plate readers can follow cars in 43 Bringing Context back into privacy the theme of Big Data as our many big cities and highways, regulation and beyond. About limitation on new social world, one that while cameras in public spaces re- purpose as an (old) response to (new) data Thas been taking shape thanks to three cord every second they see. Many challenges important recent advances in infor- of these sensors work without us by Karoline Krenn mation technology, all accelerated in even noticing them, like high reso- the last few years. lution satellite photos that can now 54 OpEd First, there has been an enor- deliver resolutions of 30 centime- by Jenny Andersson mous increase in our capacity to ters, while others, like our own gather and transmit data. Sensor digital cameras, require our active 56 Book reviews and communication technology al- participation by taking the pictures lows the inexpensive collection of and then uploading the digital im- Editor vast quantities of information, aid- ages. Some sensors record physical Akos Rona-Tas, University of California, ed by the fact that society has been properties, like heat sensors at air- San Diego enticed to communicate and run ports picking out passengers arriv- Book reviews editor its everyday life more and more ing with a fever from abroad; oth- Lisa Suckert, Max Planck Institute digitally. We don’t write letters, ers that scan barcodes and micro- for the Study of Societies only emails, and we do it on our chips are designed to recognize Editorial board GPS equipped smart phones that coded information we must first Patrik Aspers, University of St. Gallen; Jens sense our location and transmit create and encode. Recently, many Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study our messages instantaneously. Our of these sensors have become tiny, of Societies, Cologne; Johan Heilbron, cars and appliances have sensors cheap, as well as more sophisticat- Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris; that communicate with their man- ed in their ability to detect whatev- Richard Swedberg, Cornell University, Ithaca ufacturer, and automatic license er they need to sense. As commu- economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Volume 21 · Number 1 · November 2019 Note from the editor: The Brave New World of Big Data by Akos Rona-Tas 2 nication technology improves, this vast quantity of Two articles discuss India and its effort to intro- data can move ever faster. The coming of 5G systems duce Aardhaar, an information system that would al- will increase broadband speed by a factor of 20 and low every citizen to be incorporated into a unified da- decrease latency (wait time created by the way signals tabase by assigning them a unique 12-digit number are processed) by a similar magnitude. This allows for using their demographic information and three bio- the creation of the internet of things (IOT), where ob- metric identifiers, a photo of their face, finger print jects like self-driving cars can communicate with one and iris scan. Reetika Khera, Professor of Economics another in real time without human intervention. Op- at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad tical cables and broadband networks can now move and Ursula Rao, Professor of Anthropology at the Uni- the information from sensors to databases in millisec- versity of Leipzig, describe how Aardhaar was origi- onds to make them available for use in real time and nally introduced to improve the delivery of welfare for storage in databases. services and then to promote financial inclusion, im- Our increasing ability to store and process data is mediately encountering various problems and unin- the second technological advance. That capacity has tended consequences that they illustrate with power- grown exponentially following Gordon Moore’s fa- ful vignettes. Rao emphasizes the new form of gover- mous prediction in the April 1965 issue of Electronics nance Aardhaar aspires to deliver, while Khera con- magazine. The latest breakthrough in quantum com- nects it to a wider literature on the digital economy puting by Google opens even more dizzying horizons. and politics. And third, new powerful algorithms have been The article on China’s infamous social credit invented. There have been two important milestones system by Chuncheng Liu, a doctoral student at the in computer algorithms: machine learning and hierar- University of California, San Diego, provides a de- chical artificial neural networks. The conceptual, tailed map of the multipronged effort to create a na- mathematical breakthroughs happened in the 1980s tionwide system that assigns a score of trustworthiness and 1990s. However, in the last decade, a series of suc- to all Chinese citizens. While Aardhaar is intended to cessful applications of machine learning and hierarchi- serve as a broad framework for the datafication of the cal neural networks (or deep learning) have generated un- Akos Rona-Tas is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, founding faculty precedented excitement. The of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and Past President of the Society for the Advancement of first provided a new ap- Socio-Economics. He is the author of the books Plastic Money, Constructing Markets for Credit Cards proach to computing that re- in Eight Postcommunist Countries (with Alya Guseva), and Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: placed expert systems trying Demise of Communism and Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary. He published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, Social Science to model existing knowledge Research, East European Politics and Societies, Socio-Economic Review, Journal of Comparative with algorithmic discovery. Economics, Sociological Research and Methods and in various edited volumes. His general areas of The second offered an ex- interest include economic sociology, risk and uncertainty, rational choice theory, and statistical and tremely powerful statistical survey methodology. Currently, he is working on credit card markets and consumer credit in tool to uncover existing pat- emerging economies, risk analysis in food safety regulation, and algorithmic and human predic- terns in data. A breakthrough tions of the future. [email protected] in speech recognition came in 2010, two years later in computer vision, and in population, the social credit system takes the next 2014–2015 in machine translation. These and other step: it attempts to combine available data to punish or highly visible achievements have captured the social reward and ultimately predict social behavior. Liu ar- imagination and have created a new set of social ex- gues that presently the system is best viewed not as a pectations – some hopeful, others dystopic – that not dystopic, totalitarian imposition by the state but as a long ago were confined to the realm of science fiction. fragmented and incomplete project with deep histori- In this issue of Economic Sociology, the articles cal roots and internal contradictions. step away from the flurry of excitement and anxiety Unlike in China, where credit scoring was initi- about the future and focus on the way new informa- ated by the state, in the United States the system of tion technology runs up against the texture of eco- credit scoring emerged from market transactions. nomic, political and social life. Barbara Kiviat, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The five articles cover a wide geographic spec- Stanford University, describes how the current system trum including India, China, the United States and the of scoring creditworthiness has developed and how European Union. They show what happens when tech- its reach has now extended well beyond consumer nology, which always changes the limits of what’s pos- lending, offering a new measure of human worth and sible, is deployed to produce a new form of digital and instrument of governance. Ultimately, these scores, algorithmic governance. like the social credit scores in China or Aardhaar in economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Volume 21 · Number 1 · November 2019 Note from the editor: The Brave New World of Big Data by Akos Rona-Tas 3 India, are intended to create order, stability and pre- Here the editor invites scholars to connect their recent dictability. research to topical concerns. We ask people to trans- Finally, Karoline Krenn, a research associate at late the findings of their research into the language of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication public sociology. In this inaugural OpEd, Jenny An- Systems in the Competence Center for Public IT in dersson, CNRS Research Professor at the Center for Berlin, recounts the European Union’s efforts to regu- European Studies (CEE), Paris, and author of the late data use, including its latest attempt, the General book, The Future of the World, shifts our attention Data Protection Regulation. Her contribution high- from the present to the future and explains how to lights the importance of putting limitations on the think about futurology, as a peculiar form of knowl- purposes for which data gathered about people can be edge production about things yet to happen. used. She shows how this concern emerged from a de- All six contributions stress that the new tools of- bate in Germany in the 1970s. Her piece underscores fered by recent technological advances are far from one of the main problems of algorithmic governance: just describing existing patterns and making logical as lived experience is turned into data and further projections.