Back in 2015, Techdirt wrote about a government project in China that involves „citizen scores,“ a rating system that will serve as a measure of a person‘s political compliance. The authorities aim to do that by drawing on the huge range of personal data that we all generate in our daily use of the Internet. The data would be scooped up from various public and private services and fed into an algorithm to produce an overall citizen score that could be used to reward the obedient and punish the obstreperous. Naively, we might suppose that only authoritarian governments could ever obtain all that highly-revealing information, but an article from supchina.com reveals that is far from the case. It discusses some great journalism from Guangzhou‘s Southern Metropolis Daily, whose reporters documented their success in buying every kind of personal data about colleagues from „tracking“ services advertised online: