"Entrepreneur" Rent-Seeks a Privacy Violation From His Educrat Brother
So which is the worst aspect of a plan by the Middletown, Rhode Island, school district to tag students with RFID chips in their backpacks?
1. The lack of necessity. (ACLU: “We are not questioning the school district’s ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it’s a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves.”)
2. The privacy issues. (Parents can opt out and the tags only convey a proprietary number and no personal information.)
3. The glaring conflict of interest in the program:
Ed Collins, the district’s facilities manager … is the brother of Chris Collins, who founded MAP Information Technology last year. The district did not need clearance from the state ethics commission to set up the testing, however, because the program is free during the pilot, Kraeger said.
I vote for Number 3.
Incidentally:
The district, which serves about 2,500 students, is the company’s only client, said Deborah Rapp, the company’s director of marketing and communications.
Whatever happened to “avoiding even the appearance of impropriety”? Oh right, I forgot: politicians and bureaucrats do not subscribe to that pesky principle. Their version is: “Can we get away with it?”?
The fact that the school district is getting something for free overlooks the symmetrical fact that “businessman brother” is also getting something for free: trial data, user feedback, etc. Via a taxpayer-funded government entity and without any compensation to the school district (and by proxy the taxpayers who fund it), and without any competitive bidding. To “school district brother” and his co-conspirators, this seems perfectly innocuous?
So I guess we have a hat trick: privacy incursions, kids as guinea pigs, rent-seeking. Rick Perry would be proud.
(Via Out of Control.)
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Filed under: Rent-Seeking