ChoicePoint Wins Big Brother Award
Wired
Sun April 17, 2005
Area: Atlanta
A data broker that sold personal information to identity thieves, an elementary school that tried to track students with radio-frequency ID tags and a consulting firm that helped orchestrate an invasive traveler-monitoring system all received honors this week from privacy rights advocates.
The honorees were named as winners of this year's U.S. Big Brother Awards, a dubious prize intended to shame government agencies and companies that have done the most to invade personal privacy. Award recipients received a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head.
"There were so many eligible choices," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director of U.S. PIRG and a member of the panel of privacy experts who served as judges. "We should have done it like American Idol and had regionals and semis."
Faced with pressure to select finalists from an unusually large pool of nominees, Mierzwinski said, judges homed in on one of the obvious picks: data broker ChoicePoint.
ChoicePoint received Big Brother's Greatest Corporate Invader award in 2001. This year, after the company generated headlines for selling personal information about 145,000 people to criminals, judges decided to grant it a Lifetime Menace award.
"I hope that encourages them to straighten out this year," said Mierzwinski, who said he is optimistic that much-publicized security lapses at ChoicePoint and other data dealers will lead to more-stringent regulation of the industry.
"We're approaching that kind of a perfect storm with privacy this year. With so many privacy scandals out there, Congress might actually do the right thing," he said.
In another crowded field of nominees for the Most Invasive Proposal or Project award, judges tapped Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California. The school's principal had sought to track individual students with RFID tags to simplify taking attendance and reduce vandalism. After parents protested, the school dropped the program in February.
Brittan Elementary wasn't the only educational institution cited for invasive privacy practices. The Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics won the Worst Public Department award for a proposed program that would collect data on 15 million children across 6,000 schools.
According to Privacy International, the U.K. watchdog group that sponsors the Big Brother awards, the proposed program would track such information as credits earned, degree plans, race, ethnicity, grants and loans received, and tax status. The federal government would hold the data for at least the life of the student.
From the private sector, judges chose the consulting firm Accenture for the Worst Corporate Invader award. Judges, according to Privacy International, were particularly appalled by the Bermuda-based company's work on a controversial traveler-screening program called US-Visit that would keep fingerprints and other records of visitors to the United States.
Privacy International announced the award winners Thursday at the 2005 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Seattle.
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