Google Doodle Conspiracy?: Search Giant Accused of Using Art Contest to Amass Data on America's Children
Courtesy Google
The Google-4-Doodle application's asks for children's social security information, and has thus been raising eyebrows about the company's privacy policy.
Have you heard that New York's Whitney Museum has partnered with Google Inc. to sponsor a massive, nationwide art contest for children? The "Doodle-4-Google" contest is currently taking entrants, with a winner set to be announced on May 19, and an exhibition of the top 40 finalists to open at the Whitney shortly thereafter. The contest invites K-12 students to "redesign Google’s homepage logo," with entries to be judged by actress Whoopie Goldberg, "Garfield" creator Jim Davis, and artist and illustrator Maira Kalman, among others. It all seems to be in the spirit of corporate community outreach, with the top student-drawn artwork getting not just a $15,000 college scholarship but also scoring a $25,000 technology grant for his or her school. However, the kiddie art contest seems to have been dragged into a controversy stirred by concerns about Google's effect on internet privacy.
The furor was touched off by an article on the Huffington Post by Bob Bowdon, a documentarian whose film "The Cartel" railed against public school teachers (It was funded by the Moving Picture Institute, an outfit dedicated to spreading libertarian ideology through film). In what seems to have been an overblown attempt to prevent duplicate entries, the Doodle-4-Google contest had asked parents to include the last four digits of their child's social security number when entering. Based on this, Bowdon accused Google of attempting to use the art contest as a Trojan horse to build a "national, commercial database of names and addresses of American children" which "would be worth many millions to marketing firms and retailers." He implied that the search giant might have a secret algorithm that could use the data provided to guess the entirety of a child's social security number.
As Bowdon himself admitted, there was no evidence that Google was actually doing such a thing, and the company changed the procedure after complaints from parents. However, given increasing uneasiness about privacy on the Web, the story took off.
Now, even congress is involved in Google's art furor, with representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus issuing a statement declaring themselves to be "deeply concerned" about reports of Google's "sketchy practices" in Doodle-4-Google. They plan hearings about the collection of children's data online.All the fuss, however, might serve to spotlight a far stranger aspect of this affair. To wit, why is the Whitney hosting a corporate art contest with Google? However altruistic-sounding the contest is, it will ultimately be a showcase for different rendering of a corporate logo. It's hard to believe that the Whitney would consider hosting a show of kids drawings of the Coca-Cola or McDonalds logo. Of course, all of that Google money has led museums to make some half-baked programming choices in the past.
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