The global COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably been a hardship for just about everyone. Millions of jobs have been lost, businesses closed, and school children have missed out on a productive education. This will have an effect on our society for years. It has also provided great opportunities for governments to implement restrictions that were unimagined before.

Using emergency powers, states governors have selectively restricted gatherings. Religious gatherings are not ok, but protests, riots, and gambling is just fine. A skeptical person may see this as a trial to see how much freedom the American populace is willing to surrender.

As a thought experiment, what would a government do if it knew what you were thinking? What if it also knew where you went? A government could use this information in all kinds of ways.

A good example is the Chinese Social Credit system.

China’s social credit system is a government program being implemented nationwide to regulate its citizens’ behavior based on a point system.

Under this system, citizens are ranked in different areas of civil life using data collected from court documents, government or corporate records, and in some cases, citizen observers.

Citizens with higher scores have had an easier time getting bank loans, free medical checkups and discounts on heating.

Points have been deducted for traffic violations, selling faulty products or defaulting on loan payments. In some cases, people with bad social credit scores have been barred from buying airline or train tickets.

A lot of the information needed to implement this is already available. Facebook, Twitter, and Google track most everything that happens on the internet. Facebook can track you even if you don’t have an account.

Facebook tracks internet users even if they are logged off or don’t have an account on the social network, the company confirmed on Monday (April 16) as it attempted to shake off the unprecedented controversy that arose following allegations that it facilitated a breach of user data linked to an estimated 87 million accounts.

The platform has admitted that applications and websites that use Facebook services—such as embedded “like” or “share” buttons, login pages, analytics or advertising—are not able to distingish if the user actually has a Facebook account. The U.S. social network receives the information anyway.

If you do have an account, the thoughts you stream out into the web space are vacuumed up and analyzed by the NSA for government use. As for your location, the phone you carry around knows where you are, and where you have been. Soon the government will even know who you associate with. One of the first executive orders President Biden signed called for the creation of a Health Job Corps that would be trained to contact trace.

All that is needed to complete a social credit program in the United States is a government that is willing to factor in a person’s beliefs.

Several media figures and Democrats have called for lists to be made of President Donald Trump’s “sycophants” or supporters following the presidential election, suggesting that these lists will be used in the future to hold the president’s supporters accountable.

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future,” Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Cortez asked Friday, the day before media outlets called the presidential race for Biden. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

These are dangerous times.