Question of the day: is Moscow preparing to introduce a Chinese social rating system?

The news that the Moscow authorities will collect personal data about the families of city dwellers, including pets, actual income and relatives, worried users of social networks. The Moscow authorities explained this as usual - allegedly by simplifying the procedure for obtaining benefits.

To implement this initiative, the Moscow Department of Information Technologies (DIT) is ready to spend 185 million rubles from the city budget, which will create a detailed and personalized database about each resident of the capital and integrate it into other systems, such as Gosuslugami and the mos.ru website. ...This database will contain not only the passport data of citizens, their SNILS (personal insurance policy number) and OMS (Compulsory Health Insurance) numbers, but also information about the actual place of residence, relatives, place of work, actual income, even about school grades of children and about pets, the newspaper writes.

Experts, quite logically, fear that an almost Chinese system of data on citizens could be created in Moscow. According to Alexander Savelyev, deputy chairman of the commission for legal support of the digital economy of the Moscow branch of the Russian Bar Association, many Muscovites will be forced to transfer an array of data about themselves in order to receive benefits.

On social networks, they write about this:

“Moscow is getting ready to introduce the Chinese system of social ratings. In general, this is an intermediate step towards the introduction of a social rating on the Chinese model. Sobyanin will create a layer of declassed elements like in China. Of course, neither himself, nor his relatives, nor his pets, nor high-ranking officials, nor, moreover, their actual income, will not be in the database, as now there are no cameras with recognition in areas of compact residence of the elite. Since they value their own civil rights and freedoms, they are not an empty phrase for them..."

And journalist Viktor Yadukha drew attention to another, also very important aspect:

“It seems that Sobyanin has decided to cancel Luzhkov's allowances for pensioners in the capital. The Moscow authorities will collect personal data of applicants for benefits, including actual place of residence, income of all family members and pets. And it's not just about saving on the poorest. It's just that elections as an institution have been completely dismantled. There is no longer any need to placate even the main pro-government electorate. Once they threw a handout, and that's enough.

How can a retired Muscovite live? No way. Selling an apartment (all transactions over 600 thousand rubles are also monitored so as not to evade taxes) and move into the wilderness, where life is not much cheaper. Well, or rent an apartment to rent in a cheaper place. And the move of a Moscow pensioner from Moscow, even to the Moscow region to a dacha (like the very fact of having a dacha) is one of the reasons to deny him an additional payment to his pension..."

In addition, the new service, according to experts, will bring together all the data already collected in one place, speeding up the provision of public services, but at the same time increasing the risk of information leakage.

However, some Muscovites found an original way out of this situation:

“Well, I don’t know, at my work in a state institution they also collected data. I wrote that I had a Troika card, an electric train ticket and what else I didn’t have there. However, I left them their mobile phone number, because I still don't turn it on..."