Shazeda Ahmed is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how Chinese citizens interact with technology that teaches them about China's social credit system, and how private tech firms cooperate with the state in producing the technological infrastructure of the social credit system. Previously, she has worked as a researcher for the Citizen Lab, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by the New America Foundation.
Last Updated: May 31, 2018
Viewpoint
04.22.19
The Messy Truth About Social Credit
from Logic
Almost every day, I receive an email from Google Alerts about a new article on China’s “social credit system.” It is rare that I encounter an article that does not contain several factual errors and gross mischaracterizations. The social credit...
Viewpoint
05.30.18
Who’s Really Responsible for Digital Privacy in China?
While the United States is reeling from the revelation that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million Facebook accounts, China’s biggest tech companies and regulators are confronting a wave of of their own...
Reports
12.12.17
Central Planning, Local Experiments
Shazeda Ahmed & Bertram Lang
Mercator Institute for China Studies
The “Social Credit System” is designed to monitor and rate citizens and companies in China and to guide their behavior. “It is a wide-reaching project that touches on almost all aspects of everyday life,” the authors Mareike Ohlberg, Bertram Lang,...
Media
02.21.14
How the Internet and Social Media Are Transforming China
“The Internet has radically transformed China,” said Emily Parker, author of the book Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, in a public discussion at Asia Society in New York on February 19.Talking about the Internet’...