Slashdot Mirror
The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected Internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated Web-crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites and to track operators of online shops, poker, and porn sites. Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, and Canada have joined The Netherlands in pursuing the 'Xenon' program with the assistance of an Amsterdam-based data mining company. Wired News reports that the Web crawler uses so-called 'slow search' to avoid creating excessive traffic on a site or drawing attention in the sites' server logs." The article notes that the US IRS will neither confirm nor deny using similar technology.
Don't worry in a few weeks Google will buy the company, absorb the technology and will then give everybody's tax information away in exchange for looking at small text ads. And don't laugh 'cause you know it's gonna happen
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.