We all heard about the guy in korat who is said to keep dossiers about
the expats here. But no, this isn't about him - this time! There seems
to be another person who opened a forum recently, maybe with the main
purpose, maybe on the side only, harvesting data of people participating
in and visiting his site. No problem, as long as he uses strings of
information for the administration of his forum. But as he goes out of
his way to find personal data of people and match them with the strings
he violates the Computer Crime Act.He shouldn't be so stupid to even give evidence of his activities.
On many forums people are allowed to register with a nick. As long as they did not expressively enter personal data like their real name,a recognizable email address or a link to a home page, is is a sign of utter disrespect (and plain stupidity) to expose to anybody - including the person he collected data about - that he was able to spy on them. Now does he expect anybody to post any more on his forum? They have to live in fear of blatant abuse of the information they would give by posting on his site, which can be connected to their person, though they were guaranteed anonymity.
If somebody wants posted information to be matched with his person he can register with his real name. And if a forum admin wants that the information posted can be matched to a real person, even by himself, he must disallow registration under a nick, otherwise he deceives our community. People lacking this moral insight should not run a forum they label "community service"
The person I am talking about might have done this for a game only and the immaturity to display smugness. Nevertheless it is not acceptable!
Mai pen rye? Only people as immature as these scrapers might say it doesn't matter, that their guaranteed anonymity was not kept. Maybe they think they couldn't suffer any damage from abuse of these scraped personal data. Maybe they're right so far, that they themselves don't have any privacy worth keeping.
But how about the relatives and friends? Maybe after the persons so freely granting everybody access to personal data, allowing scraping, already passed away have their widows get "assistance" from old friends who can identify themselves by an intense knowledge of personal data - and lead the beloved survivors into misery, for example...
