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Brownie Troop Field Trip Into The Privacy Jungle

My grade-school-age daughter came home with a permission slip needing a signature in advance of her Brownie troop's field trip to a local tutoring center. But I bristled when I saw the information required. The center, a commercial business, wanted to know her name, address, age, grade level, school, favorite subject, and academic proficiency in math, reading, and spelling.

That seemed like a lot to ask for a 45-minute visit to the local Score! center. Score! Learning Inc. is a national chain and a division of Kaplan Inc., the company that helps college-bound kids sweat through the SATs, which itself is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Co. My worry is that my daughter's data--collected so a tutor could get acquainted with her--will find its way into the company's marketing database. I could be getting junk mail about how to make her smarter for the next 15 years.

I'm sure my daughter's troop isn't the only one to walk into a Score! center with sheets full of personal data to hand over. It wouldn't surprise me if Score! and Kaplan have data on thousands of these brown-vested, patch-covered little adventurers. Yet I don't know how my daughter's data will be used or who will have access to it--the company's privacy policy wasn't included with the form she brought home that day. I e-mailed the company's PR department to inquire, but haven't heard back. (Score!'s online privacy policy offers some clues, but it's hard to know how it applies to offline interactions.) An employee at the local center said by phone that some of my daughter's data (name, address, age, grade) will indeed remain in its computer system. "Everyone goes into it," she said. "They stay in there."

It's unclear whether that data is used only by the local center or, as I fear, goes into a company-wide database. The employee said it stays local, and I hope she's right, but I doubt it. She said data about the kids' academic proficiency and tasks they perform while at the center gets purged from the system. We can only hope.

This isn't a knock on the services that Score! provides; my daughter enjoyed her visit there. It's merely one more example of how businesses have become relentless in their pursuit of personal information. Unfortunately, as we keep learning, they're not doing a good job of protecting it. My colleague Patricia Keefe argues it's time for a Data Bill of Rights.

Public trust in how businesses manage customer data is at an all-time low. There will be a backlash against these nonstop requests for information about ourselves. Shortly after the Score! episode, I got another tell-us-about-yourself survey in the mail from a different organization. That one went straight into the trash.

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