Constitution
Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday – Tracking College Students
In 2011 the government spend more than eight hundred thousand dollars tracking college students who volunteered for this Orwellian project.
Topline: Imagine a world where government-funded scientists track your every move online, including your location and all of your text messages.
It’s not a dystopian fiction, or at least it wasn’t in 2011. The National Science Foundation paid the University of Notre Dame $802,000 for a study that monitored the cell phone usage of 200 college student volunteers for two years. The money would be worth $1.1 million today.
The college student tracking project
That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.
Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.
Coburn’s Wastebook 2011 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $7 billion, including the money spent on Notre Dame’s Orwellian research.
Key facts: Researchers at Notre Dame’s Wireless Institute were tasked with answering the question, “What effect does pervasive, wireless network access have on the social interactions of young adults?”
Participating students signed consent and waiver forms and received cell phones donated by Sprint. Four Notre Dame professors tracked their location, emails, texts, app purchases, social media posts, and even their music listening habits.
Dr. Aaron Striegel, associate professor in Notre Dame’s College of Computer Science and Engineering, said in a press release, “The data gathered from the study will offer profound insights about the social impact of always-on network access as well as improve how we design and manage future wireless networks.”
Another tracking project?
Not one to be outdone, the National Institutes of Health joined the spending spree with a similar study in 2015. Notre Dame received a $3 million grant to track students using wearable technology like FitBits to analyze the relationship between physical activity and friendships.
Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.
Summary: It shouldn’t take expert researchers and huge swaths of taxpayer funds to realize the internet has a significant impact on college students’ lives.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Jeremy Portnoy, former reporting intern at Open the Books, is now a full-fledged investigative journalist at that organization. With the death of founder Adam Andrzejewki, he has taken over the Waste of the Day column.
