Always looking on the dark side

According to an AP story out of Marietta, Georgia,

[t]hree school districts in the Atlanta area last week became the first in the country to offer the parental-monitoring option of an electronic lunch payment system called Mealpay.com, created by Horizon Software International of Loganville, Ga. ...

For two years, the payment system, used by 1,000 school districts in 21 states, has allowed parents to electronically prepay for student lunches. Students type in their identification number before the cafeteria cashier rings up each day's lunch bill. The bill then is deducted from the student's account.

The system was initially designed as a convenient way to make sure children bought lunch without worrying that lunch money would get lost, spent on other things or stolen.

However, these days parents increasingly are interested in what their kids eat away from home. It was requests from concerned parents that prompted Horizon Software to develop the online meal-monitoring option.

With this system, parents can monitor everything their children buy for lunch, even that for which they pay in cash out of their own pocket: That, too, is recorded.

School officials say it will "get parents' involvement" in what the kids are eating. I say it's just another step down the slope to a total surveillance society, where everything you do can be watched and recorded by someone with more power than you. (Remember, in this case it's not even just the parents who can take note of every food purchase; the school can, too.)

Government watching your every step on the streets. Businesses tracking your every purchase and how you use it, even to where you put it in your house. Car manufacturers helping police watch how you drive. Bosses surreptitiously tracking employees. Right down to spouses secretly keeping tabs on spouses and parents monitoring children everywhere they go.

I think I need to go re-read Erich Fromm's book Escape From Freedom. It won't help, but just maybe it'll help things make more sense.

Footnote: Regarding school lunches, Dr. Douglas Kamerow, an obesity expert at RTI International, said the biggest challenge is "moving things clearly not good for kids out and making the choices more appealing."

Oh, my - that thinking is, like, so 20^th century! Electronic monitoring is today, man! It's cool!