Originally published April 26 2005
Watchdog group hands out awards for the worst invasions of privacy
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
This year's Big Brother awards, which point out particularly severe invasions of personal privacy, have selected their "winners" for 2004. The awards are designed to shame companies and agencies into cleaning up their acts and respecting peoples' privacy. This year's recipients include ChoicePoint, which sold 145,000 records of personal information to criminals and Accenture, which has offered to implement a system to track the fingerprints and personal information of anyone entering the US. As well, Brittan Elementary School was recognized for its attempt to track students with RFID tags and the National Center for Education Studies received an award for its plan to record personal information about 15 million students in 6,000 schools across the country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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