On 06/11/06, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is a major problem of the internet age. Lots and lots of disparate collections of innocuous and useful information can be pulled together, again entirely publicly, and have unforseen cumulative effects. Before, if you wanted to track down information on someone, it might have taken days or weeks of patient digging, social engineering, this and that and the next thing. Now? One hour, maybe fifteen or twenty dollars, and you have a name and an address and a telephone number and a photo or three, maybe an email address or a blog, &c &c. Yes, the source data is all public, but the synthesis of that data is new and - in many cases - the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. We're taking material from "public sources", which can be anything from the phone book to directory entries... but it can also encompass the websites which have a particular passion for "outing" various groups of people, or the sex-offender registry, or court documents, or... Whether the collation of this information is "good" or "bad" essentially depends on the motives of the user, and we have no way of measuring that - you can usually spot a hatchetjob in an encyclopedia article, but the end result on a site like this is indistinguishable from a normal page! Given the number of complaints we recieve about material like this on en.wp, which *doesn't* encourage original synthesis or the publishing of private information, I'm really not confident this project won't just be a massive liability to us... Yes, we can make people ex-directory. Yes, we can take them out if they complain. But that's a reactive method - it relies on them noticing and complaining, and by then the damage is done. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk