Tax authorities in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Britain and Canada have deployed a stealthy web-spider called "Xenon" that looks for people earning unreported online income, and subsequently busts them as tax-cheats:
The spider can also be configured and trained to look at particular economic niches — a useful feature for compiling lists of business in industries that traditionally have high rates of non-filing. "For instance, weight control (yields) 85,000 hits, some for products … also services," says Sweden's Hardyson.
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.
"Of course it's not illegal," said Strom. "I don't feel quite comfortable having a tax office sending out those kind of spiders."
