change.gov

Right now I am battling a horrible cold and so far it is winning. There is nothing worse than feeling like you might be over the hump, only to find out that maybe you are not.

I am somewhat equally concerned about something I've bumped into on the web today. Just when I thought we were past the election shennanigans, I am kinda thinking they are just starting. The example would be the "change.gov" site.

So far in the history of the web websites that end in ".gov" typically instill confidence in us. If we hand over our personal information, we expect that info to be respected and protected with the same standards as any other well protected government website. Now, I can't definitively confirm this, but with a few whois tricks, some static IP addressing pinging, I get the feeling that change.gov is not really a traditional government website. You might not care, until you realize that they are harvesting American individuals contact information via this site (i.e. in at least five different situations on this small site they ask you to hand over some personal information, like you name, address and phone number.) It seems that the sites are hosted on a combination of hardware that sits in Georgia and Colorado.

Here is another part that I find a bit questionable. In a recent political talk show hosted by Charlie Rose, they discussed the very savvy use of technology by the Obama campaign. The example they gave had to do with the use of text messaging. There was this moment when the Obama campaign said that they would announce his running mate via text message. All you had to do was submit your cell phone number to them to receive the announcement before the rest of press got the message. The goal here was to simply harvest cell phone numbers for the purpose of campaign marketing. It is reasonable for the campaign to gather those cell phone numbers and use them for the purpose of the campaign, including text messaging the running mate announcement, but I wonder if people truly understood how the campaign was (or still is) intending on using those cell phone numbers. Maybe some people don't care, but I would!? More importantly, change.gov is asking people to submit their information because the Obama / Biden administration transition team is hiring! i have no doubt that they are, but when you look at the information they are collecting, that is one sham of a form! I can only imagine the number of people who would want to submit their information, imagining that they will be selected to personally work with this new administration. Understand that the fineprint says that both the transition team and the administration will use your submitted contact information... yeah, I am sure they will. Who knows what for?

This is an incredibly blurry line between legitimate politics and campaign marketing that doesn't seem to know when to quit. I am in favor of the government wanting to team up with regular folks. I am not in favor of to 2012 Obama campaign reelection committee pretending to pimp jobs to America in an effort to primarily harvest contact information unwittingly.

(To read a few more articles on scrubbing on the change.gov site see http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/11/09/obamas-change-gov-site-undergoes-severe-scrubbing-40-hr-college-service- and http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/11/exclusive-obama-deletes-agenda-from-transition-web/)