China is planning to launch a Social Credit Score (SCS) system that ranks its 1.3 billion residents according their trustworthiness by 2020. It has been called as a futuristic version of Big Brother as it uses large variety of data to monitor and evaluate its citizens’ behaviour. How would you feel if your trustworthiness was publicly measured with a single algorithm-based score?

For over a decade website visitors needed to prove being a human by clicking a checkbox or solving simple challenges called Captchas. Google’s evolved service, invisible reCAPTCHA, can now perform the check-up automatically by recognising humans based on their online behaviour. This is yet another algorithmic surveillance we wilfully submit to.

A key inventor of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee is concerned about the current state of the Internet. According to Berners-Lee, three trends threaten the Internet; people have lost control over their personal data, misinformation spreads fast, and political advertising lacks transparency.