I've been working on a privacy impact assessment in my day job and have been reading information on privacy. A very interesting article on Wired regarding a Wikipedia analyzer that scans Wikipedia edits against organizations that may be removing relevant information about themselves or insert info about their enemies or competition.
Excerpt:
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
I found this quote particularly interesting and insightful by Virgil Griffith:
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
Mr. Griffth also created the Mother's Maiden Name analyzer -- for Texans only it seems, but I am sure this can be scaled for any other geography that keeps public records online.
