Creepy Carlyle

It’s no secret that every GP is trying to get inside the minds of their LPs. The Carlyle Group, however, might be trying a bit too hard.

At its annual meeting in late September, the private equity powerhouse implanted “smart chips” into LP name badges in an attempt to track its investors around the meeting and better understand their preferences, a peHUB story revealed.

It gets worse. Given out at the event, the high-tech name badges were equipped with radio-frequency identification and near-field communication technologies to automatically track the sessions that the LPs attended.

Investors had the option of wearing a regular badge instead of the high tech version, but nevertheless, some were not enthused with Carlyle’s go at playing Big Brother. One LP told of throwing away his badge after not having received an explanation for why Carlyle was tracking his whereabouts.

To be fair, it was the first time Carlyle had used the tracking technology and the badges reportedly only worked in the rooms where sessions were being held. But we can’t blame LPs for being a little wary. Trusting relationships and violations of privacy rarely go hand in hand, and the path from “attentive host” to “stalker” is a slippery slope.