Little Opt Out Joke
By now most everyone knows that the Pentagon is working on a database of teens and young adults for marketing and recruiting purposes. Rather, has been working on it for a while, and just now decided to fulfill its Privacy Act obligations and publish a notice in the Federal Register. The same day that comments were due on that notice — EPIC’s are here — the Washington Post ran a story, and the DOD ran a press briefing.
In the press briefing the DOD was explaining that this is actually quite allright, as they have been doing it for several years, and just now that they decided to move the location of the database were they alerted to the fact that they had to post a notice. And so they gave us the notice. The DOD says that people can opt-out. On that topic, the briefing went like this:
Chu: You can under the Privacy Act write in and say I don’t want to be on your list and we then take you out of the list.
Media: How can anyone have opted out if they didn’t know the program existed?
Chu: That’s why we have a notice in the Federal Register.
Media: [Laughter].