Texas City ISD Announces Online Fundraising Tool

TEXAS CITY, TX — It may seem kind of like a Faustian bargain. Texas City ISD is rolling out a new online fundraising tool called StingDollars.com.

The software allows online retailers to contribute a percentage of each purchase made by registered users back to Texas City ISD, home of the Stingarees. In theory, the free-to-use program is beneficial to the district.

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Texas City ISD residents will be able to get a percentage of their purchase from major online retailers, like Amazon or Walmart, refunded back to the district. The problem is that StingDollars sounds an awful lot like spyware.

The directions from the district instruct Texas City ISD parents to install the reminder service on their computer, and the reminder will monitor their web searches.

Whenever a person goes to a participating retailer's website, like say Best Buy, a reminder pops up with a link to authorize the program to siphon a portion of the purchase price to fund the school district. The question becomes, like it is with everything these days, what is being done with that search data?

The architecture for the fundraising tool is owned by ShareRewards, which is itself owned by Pursuant. Since neither ShareRewards nor its parent company have a clearly labeled privacy policy on their website the whole thing seems a little off.