- Two major data brokers, a California elementary school
and Google's Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards
-- a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices.
-
- Award recipients will receive a statue of a golden boot
stomping on a human head.
-
- The nominees were among those on a list made public Wednesday
by Privacy International, the British watchdog group that runs the annual
U.S. Big Brother Awards. The group plans to announce winners on April 14.
-
- Simon Davies, Privacy International's director, predicts
that this will be an extraordinarily difficult year for selecting a winner,
given that there are so many strong candidates.
-
- He said the group received nominations for hundreds of
companies, organizations and government agencies. "People have gone
out of their way to investigate and come to intelligent conclusions about
the balance of public interest and private rights," Davies said.
-
- Nominees are selected by the public, after which a panel
of judges, mostly privacy advocates, chooses the winners.
-
- There are some clear front runners. Davis estimated that
at least one in five nominations submitted named ChoicePoint, the data
broker that generated headlines earlier this year after selling personal
information for about 145,000 people to criminals.
-
- ChoicePoint already received Big Brother's Greatest Corporate
Invader award in 2001. This year, it could receive the Lifetime Menace
award, previously granted to Osama bin Laden, Adm. John Poindexter and
the National Security Agency, among others.
-
- ChoicePoint declined to comment on the nomination.
-
- Several government agencies and initiatives appear likely
to get a prize, including the Transport Security Administration for its
controversial airline passenger-screening program. The US-Visit fingerprinting
and data system, which seeks to fingerprint all foreign visitors to the
United States, also made the short-list for awards.
-
- Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California, is an
unlikely candidate, but received a sizeable number of nominations for its
attempt to make students wear ID badges containing radio-frequency identification
devices.
-
- A second data broker, Acxiom, is also a strong contender
for an award, for lobbying to water down key federal privacy laws immediately
after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
-
- And then there's Google's Gmail, which has drawn strong
criticism for its practice of examining private messages to serve targeted
advertising.
-
- But Davies said many of the most frightening privacy
practices submitted in nominations didn't make the short-list because Privacy
International was unable to independently confirm the reports.
-
- One example of an alarming but unverified case involved
a woman who claimed her employer hired a private investigator out of suspicion
she lied about a pregnancy. Another came from a person who claimed his
employer passed on information in a work e-mail to a member of his immediate
family.
-
- Davies said people frequently nominated their employers
for a Big Brother award. In many cases, nominees were small companies or
local law enforcement agencies that, due to their size, didn't generate
much attention in the news for invasive privacy practices.
-
- In future years, however, Davies said he hopes to heap
shame on more of these obscure, privacy-invading companies and agencies.
-
- "If what's going on in these small companies is
symptomatic of what's going on in the rest of the country," he said,
"then we have to reflect that."
-
- © Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
-
- http://www.wired.com/news/cult
|
