Privacy under threat from the taxman
A new ’spider’ is crawling the Internet looking for tax cheats. A ’spider’ is a small program that trawls through the internet, traveling from site to site using hyperlinks, gathering information about the pages/sites it visits.
Usually, the ’spiders’ you’re likely to see in your web-server logs are those used by search engines like Google (Googlebot) and Yahoo, however this new one is being used by the tax services of 5 different countries namely Austria, Britain, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands with Sweden set to join later this year.
This is primarily to combat tax evasion by online businesses where it’s difficult to keep track of sales figures. So, all you eBayers out there not declaring your revenue, watch out!
