In what she described as her “most serious warning” to date, Wolf said the apps were actually a backdoor attempt to usher in a “CCP-style social credit score system”—a reference to China’s all-pervasive surveillance net that allows Beijing to rank citizens for their perceived virtue and obedience, a chilling hierarchy that can determine everything from access to schools to eligibility for loans, and is one piece of a broader surveillance dragnet that pinpoints the location of dissidents for arrest and ruthlessly censors speech that casts the ruling party in a critical light. The vaccine app was like all that, Wolf said, a system that “enslaves a billion people.”

SEED: Potential essay angle: evaluating whether health-tech apps genuinely parallel authoritarian social credit systems, or whether such comparisons overstate the case — worth fact-checking. QUESTION: Is the Wolf social credit comparison empirically grounded or a rhetorical conflation? Worth investigating the actual technical and legal differences.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 237