Is The IRS After You?

Here’s a disturbing post at Wired News. This is just the kind of thing I was talking about last week. It seems that tax agencies in some countries (the IRS would neither confirm nor deny its use) are crawling the web to catch what they assume are tax cheaters.

The program is called Xenon. Here’s a quote: Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon’s Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.

As illuminating as Xenon is for the tax man, the data-mining effort poses dangers to citizen privacy, said Par Strom, a noted privacy advocate in the world of Swedish IT.

Storm went on to say, “The information is public of course, because it’s posted on the internet,” Strom says. “It wasn’t meant to be used this way … (this is) using the naivete of people. It’s on the limit of what is ethical.”

The LIMIT? In my opinion that’s an understatement. Does this bother anyone other than me?