Monday, January 29, 2007
The Spider Crawls
Wink: Isn't Disney World a people trap operated by a mouse?
Revenue Canada is working with a web crawling program called Xenon or "Spider", along with several other countries to search certain sites in hopes of finding internet businesses that are not paying their proper taxes.
You can read the details here.
This ties in with my January 19th posting. In every day terms this is collecting information. This is understandable as far as large business or companies are concerned, but wouldn't (couldn't) it also collect personal information?
Collecting information is pretty standard as far as the internet is concerned. Google does it, Yahoo, and most search engines do, and we ourselves collect information anytime we find something we like and download it.
Do you wonder how far a program like Xenon Spider goes? Anything it does collect is saved to a database somewhere. A database that someone or many have access to. Where will that information end up? What else will it be used for if there is a bad apple in the crate?
We all know that using the internet is like an open bulletin board, but when the pages fly off they get carried by a different breeze.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Revenue Canada is working with a web crawling program called Xenon or "Spider", along with several other countries to search certain sites in hopes of finding internet businesses that are not paying their proper taxes.
You can read the details here.
This ties in with my January 19th posting. In every day terms this is collecting information. This is understandable as far as large business or companies are concerned, but wouldn't (couldn't) it also collect personal information?
Collecting information is pretty standard as far as the internet is concerned. Google does it, Yahoo, and most search engines do, and we ourselves collect information anytime we find something we like and download it.
Do you wonder how far a program like Xenon Spider goes? Anything it does collect is saved to a database somewhere. A database that someone or many have access to. Where will that information end up? What else will it be used for if there is a bad apple in the crate?
We all know that using the internet is like an open bulletin board, but when the pages fly off they get carried by a different breeze.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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