
Google Collecting Kids' SS Numbers Under the Guise of an Art Contest? - shawndumas
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/22/google-ssns
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nyellin
Here is Google's press release from the Huffington Post article:

 _This year we started accepting doodles from kids even if their school hadn't
registered for the contest. To help us keep entries distinct and remove
duplicate entries from any particular student, we asked parents for limited
information, including the last 4 digits of a student's social security
number. We later updated our forms when we recognized that we could
sufficiently separate legitimate contest entries while requesting less
information. To be clear, these last 4 digits were not entered into our
records and will be safely discarded._

 _As for the city of birth: The city of birth helps us identify whether
contestants are eligible for the contest, as winners must be either U.S.
citizens or permanent legal residents of the U.S. The information isn't used
for any other purpose."_

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-
been...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been-
colle_b_825754.html)

------
enomar
Someone needs to lookup Hanlon's razor:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor>

Also, daring fireball doesn't add anything. Link to the original source:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-
been...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been-
colle_b_825754.html)

~~~
nyellin
Your wikipedia link is dead. Try <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor>

------
tmcw
Uh, the last four digits. If it was the whole thing, I'd say this is somewhat
valid, but the required information seems to be kind of just... checking that
they're real people.

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Kylekramer
Yup. Google went through the effort of creating of an art contest to collect
SSNs. Cause after all, if they were that unscruplous, an art contest makes
more sense rather than looking at people's Gmail accounts or keylogging their
Chrome usage.

I swear something about the word Google causes Gruber and apparently many
other people to stop functioning at their normally intelligent levels.

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ralx
Let's talk about paranoia...

