Friday, June 24, 2005

Pentagon Sells Student Data To Military Marketers

I can't even believe this. The Pentagon is taking the personal information of high school students between 16 and 18, to be sold to marketing companies targeting (how apt!) potential recruits for the military.

The Washington Post reports:
The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
The data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., one of many marketing firms that use computers to analyze large amounts of data to target potential customers based on their personal profiles and habits.

"The purpose of the system . . . is to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service," according to the official notice of the program.

Privacy advocates said the plan appeared to be an effort to circumvent laws that restrict the government's right to collect or hold citizen information by turning to private firms to do the work.
Sickening.

4 comments:

Jon said...

Even friends of mine from the conservative side have issue with this new turn of events.

oldwhitelady said...

No Draft, but they're recruiting. Who's to say that these youngsters don't feel the heavy hand of the government telling them they need to sign up. By selling the information to the marketing companies, these companies are going to be doing the govt's recruiting for them. That is disgusting. How do they think up these things?

Anonymous said...

Now they can personalize their recruiting efforts. "You like puppies? So do we. And we need a few good little boys and little girls to take care of the puppies. You like math? Me too!! I joined after finishing my math scholarship. We need someone to count some stuff. No, not bodies, we don't keep body counts. Money, no, we don't track that either. But there are plenty of other things to count."

Unknown said...

I consider all these sleazy tactics the "new draft."

Unfortunately for the safety of our country, those tactics are backfiring and people are slowly realizing how aggressive and dishonest the armed forces' recruiting techniques have become (remember the creeps in Farenheit 911, combing the poor neighborhood's malls and trying to act "hip" and "with it"? Ewwww).

I think everyone who blathers their hate-filled ignorance at Free Republic ought to enlist, for one thing. Then let's suit up all the other pro-war freaks as well. If you support it, by all means, go and fight it. Money where mouth is and all that...