Google Collecting Kids' SS Numbers Under the Guise of an Art Contest?

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...

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...

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.

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.

Let's talk about paranoia...