Loading ...If you own a domain name then your privacy is at stake. The offender is a new wiki called aboutus.org. This site is a wikified directory of sites and domain names that scrapes information from your website, and from your registrar.
You cannot opt out of being included in this wiki. The best you can do is edit your own information, which of course means you have to keep going back over and over again, to make sure your information hasn’t popped back up!
His reasoning:
If the New York Times or Slashdot wrote an article about your site, there would be no “OptOut” option, right? And if you write a page on your site about AboutUs.org, there would similarly be no “OptOut” option. Same thing here.
What?!
If someone on the fucking New York Times wrote an article about me -and it ain’t likely - I doubt they’d be parading my private information all over the net. Not to mention New York Times would have a professional writer giving a balanced overview of my site, not some bot scraping info then hoping a few jackasses will pop by to edit the page.
Yes, I know my info is available from Whois. I cannot afford the privacy option. But having someone look me up on whois is a FAR CRY from having my private info included on a WIKI for fucks sake. I do NOT want to spend the rest of my internet life editing that crap on his site. But thats what he wants. The traffic of people so dissatisfied with his site that they have to go there periodically to edit the entries for their own domains.
Even worse, ALL the information for Noumenal.net was WRONG. My contact info, my email address, even the fucking screenshot was WRONG. The address they had was my old PO box in London. God knows who is using that PO Box now but it ain’t me.
If he can get such erroneous information by scraping then he’s NOT doing a very good job of managing this WIKI. I encourage everyone with a domain name to contact ray@aboutus.org and bitch the fuck out of him. Then erase all the info he has on your site.
A site like this is fine for business sites that have a real-world address and whose domains are registered through their business. But for personal sites whose owners suddenly find their personal info paraded all over the place, its a fucking nightmare.
Technorati Tags: aboutus.org, privacy on the net
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Comments
This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under criminal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
What?! That’s ridiculous. What an asshole. So, is all HIS information on that site? Can I email, fax, and snail mail him nasty letters? Why, I think I will!
For more information, you should go to the ‘concerns’ page at:
http://www.aboutus.org/ConcernsPage
Basically aboutus.org hijacks your the keywords and information for your site, so that they can appear on google associated with keywords for your site.
Another problem is that ANYONE can edit the page for your site, so any fucking spammer can come along, edit your page, put in all their information and links, and garner traffics for their own sites.
In order to prevent this from happening, domain owners will have to go to this fucking wiki every goddam day and edit their material. Is aboutus doing anything to prevent this sort of spamming? I don’t see any evidence that they are.
This infuriates me. I spend a long time each day creating fresh content for a site that 5 people read. I enjoy it, but then I look at shits like this who get a free ride off of everyone else’s hard work.
Theoretically, I see no problem with a wiki for websites. But the owners of said wiki need a better way to protect privacy, and they need a system in place to prevent spam. I’ve seen neither of these on that site.
And people should be opting in, not out. The lame opt out system on their site (which isn’t really an opt out at all!) just forces us domain owners to constantly watch the entries in our name. I encourage people to speak out against this until these people have a better system in place.
I put a robots.txt file on all sites (including you and Bas) to keep the aboutus bot from accessing your site. Of course, some bots don’t honor robots.txt files so it remains to be seen if the aboutus bot is a good bot, or a bad bot.
Please don’t remove these files. (Well, Mojo, you can if you want, but because I got Bas’ domain through my host with my free credits, my contact info is on that domain).
No nice bots were harmed during the creation of these files.
This is just preposterous. I agree that it’s just stupid to allow this guy to get away with this while he does nothing to protect people. Ludicrous. Maybe the EFF.org folks should know about this Wiki.
I’ll leave the bots file of course. I don’t want those bots searching around anyway! Reminds me of the Matrix (the good one).
There was a good one?
As soon as I can afford it, I’m going to get one of those remote mail-forwarding street addresses, to use it just for my domain registration. Seems like the best way to protect myself against ALL these sorts of things.
But it pisses me off that if I want to just sit back and have an enjoyable time online, that I have to invest in stuff like that. I’m not a big business - or even a small one. I just enjoy my online time with my friends. And yet I have to take measures like this to protect my privacy. It sucks.
What happened to the good ole days when the internet was fun?
Hi, I saw this and wanted to speak to some of the concerns here.
First, our bot did not follow the robots.txt file on the first sweep, and since August 2006 it has followed the robots.txt file. Previous entries are being fixed. We do put public information that we consider “fair use” on the site.
Second, we have tags that turn email into a hash code. Any email we see on the site that is added we protect.
Third, all edits are patrolled. A wiki is “self-healing” and relys on “soft security”. So we fix bad actors after they have spammed, which is not as often as you might think. We get an average of 2200 edits a day and percentage wise, not many bad edits.
As far as the keywords go, I am under the impression that seach engines don’t use the meta tags. We have placed them in as an interlinking category system.. which really hasn’t worked that well and we are trying to decide what to do with them.
Lastly, if you are concerned about edits to the wiki page referring to a domain you are interested in, you can sign in to AboutUs.org and in the preferences click watch this page. You will be emailed within the minute of an edit. It only emails you once till you check the page out.
Let me know if you have questions. Sorry you don’t like the idea of the site, hopefully it will become more relevant for you.
Best, Mark
Well Mark, even jackasses from aboutus are welcome at SP. We’re friendly, even when frothing at the mouth and waving our torches in the air.
As I stated in the post, I’m okay with the idea of a wiki for websites. I just feel that website owners should be able to opt in, rather than offering some half-ass opt-out that doesn’t really opt anyone out.
I also think that NO personal information should be placed on the site. If the owner of said site wants to include contact info on their entry, they can place it there, but scraping the info from WhoIs is just plain inconsiderate.
While its true that many businesses welcome the addition of their contact info on the wiki, those of us with smaller sites who use personal info (for lack of any other choice) to register our domain names are just left up shit creek.
I just think if your wiki is really a good idea, people will opt in and register their domains with your site. Just like how many people submit their sites to directories. I do not think your bots should be scouring the web for all our information. And how is anyone supposed to implement the robot.txt file if they don’t even know about their site? I only noticed your site AFTER your bot had scraped my site. It simply isn’t right.
You need to allow people to submit their sites voluntarily. You need to provide people with the option of providing their contact information. And you need a REAL opt-out system for people who’ve already been scraped by your bot.
“What?! That’s ridiculous. What an asshole. So, is all HIS information on that site? Can I email, fax, and snail mail him nasty letters? Why, I think I will!”
The answer is yes! Ray King, the CEO of AboutUs.org does list his personal contact information, including his mobile phone number publicly on the website. He does that because he believes what we’re doing is a good thing.
Name another corporation that gives you this kind of access.
I’m sorry that you don’t see the value of the AboutUs.org wiki yet, or how it can be useful to you. I assure you if you ever want to learn more about AboutUs.org, or about wiki in general we’ll be there to answer any questions or concerns in a friendly manner. We’re pretty much always available on #aboutus on Freenode. There’s also a link to a web chat on the left hand side of our front page.
What AboutUs.org is doing is a good thing, and the people doing it are good people. We’re always willing to educate, and more importantly learn.
Scott Keeler
AboutUs.org/ScottKeeler
Holy crap, they’re all coming out of the woodwork!
But the fact remains that Ray wants his address posted up there (and I seriously doubt its his home address), whereas I do not. I have done so much moving in the past few years (ie. because of divorce, katrina, etc), that I’m pretty much forced to use the only permanent address I have for most business dealings - which is the address of my elderly mom. And I’m pretty damned sure she wouldn’t want it featured on a wiki.
But do I need to re-iterate my points? Yes, the wiki could be valuable, but it needs better privacy protection. Opt-in instead of opt-out. NO POSTING OF ANYONE’S PERSONAL INFO! If they want it there, they can put it there themselves. And a way to TRULY opt out, rather than just erasing the edits under your site’s name. If such things were implemented, I would probably consider participating. But I wouldn’t want to go to Wikipedia and find my home address tacked up there! Why would I want to go to THIS wiki and find the same?
I’ve just had a look at AboutUs.org.
But what does it do? To me it looks like it grabs pages and makes them look like their content is true by throwing in extra info on the SITE owner?
That’s hilarious and stupid.
Good and trustworthy content requires effort; it’s never a freebee.
Yes but what they want is for other people to provide their content for them. By scraping our website info and setting up an entry on all of our sites, it FORCES us to keep an eye on our entry pages, and edit any erroneous material, therefore they basically FORCE people into providing content FOR THEM, rather than going the long route and writing content for themselves. What they’re doing is basically forced crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is fine when people voluntarily participate, but scraping our sites like that is nefarious, rude and inconsiderate.
A wiki for websites is fine, but I resent my sites and content being hijacked. I resent being forced to participate in their site.
And people may say that I don’t have to participate - that I can leave my entries alone, but if I did that, my personal information would still be displayed for all to see. It could pop back up there any moment - so yes, I am basically forced to keep tabs on their site to make sure my websites are properly presented.
I love that this has had 38 views and 2 of them are from Mark and Scott.
I also love the fact that they both are speaking to you as if you are simply uneducated and misguided about their wonderfully friendly website run by wonderfully friendly people. You don’t see the value of it “yet”. But you will see if you take the time to learn.
Such benign arrogance. They must be academics!
Academics or cultists.
Thats what they are - a cult. They try to force your participation, and if you resist, they gently remind you that you are as yet ‘unenlightened’, and must persist if you are to reap the benefits of the great AboutUs Lord.
Sorry guys. I worship Mercuri. And he don’t like y’all at all.
Mercuri says: they’re all jackasses.
I once found my -obsolete- webpages ended up in a commercial course. Which they posted on the web by mistake; I found that out later.
I ended up getting questions on the contents and i could not figure out why people kept asking; it all wasn’t on my page anymore.
It’s a bit like the reverse of what is happening here.
Why not just put references or links in the Wiki? Same way as Wikipedia does?
They do put links, and thats fine. Thats not the problem. The problem is finding my elderly, handicapped mom’s home address on a wiki! And the problem is having my site info placed on said wiki, thereby forcing me to participate in their site. If I don’t participate in their site, my personal info could end up on there again, or spammers could take over my page’s entry, or various erroneous information could litter the page. The problem is being forced to participate in a wiki, when I got enough crap to worry about without worrying about these guys. And they have no way to opt out - your site’s title remains on their wiki indefinitely. It is just plain inconsiderate.
Is there no way around them like being de-listed on whois or summat? I don’t think my info is on their site. Although, I guess you said something about a fee… and I think I paid one for my domains. Annoying, annoying, annoying.
You can’t get de-listed on whois. If you own a domain name, you’re listed. You can register privately, and your domain host will provide you with proxy contact info, but there is a fee for that. In other words, if you want privacy, you have to pay for it.
But none of this is an issue. AboutUs is a wiki, and anyone, anywhere can edit it. A web directory (like google or yahoo) can send a bot out to gather info on your site, but the info they display is limited to your link and your page description.
AboutUs isn’t a directory, its a wiki. Not only do they scrape info from your site, and place it on their wiki without your permission, but they also post your private contact info. Then anyone on gods green earth can come along and edit the info on your site. Spammers, flamers, etc can say whatever they want and if you don’t keep an eye on that page, it could end up being associated with any kind of spammy crap. So basically by grabbing your site they force you to participate in their wiki against your will, unless you want your site becoming associated with all sorts of spam.
And the more I think about it, the more I hate it. If it were voluntary, thats one thing, but it isn’t. They just snatch your info and stick it up there.
That totally sucks. If they’re posting a snapshot of your page aren’t they violating your copyright? They are reposting your materials off of your own domain without your express written permission… Just wondering if this is a job for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (providing Superman(R) isn’t around).
Posting a screenshot of a site, and information that comes from the meta description tag is considered fair use. And it is fair. After all, we place that description tag in our site specifically for the search engines. So it isn’t copyright infringement.
But like I’ve said, my problem isn’t with what they post about the site, its that they included me in a collaborative project without my express desire to participate, and they posted personal information about me in the process. A wiki is a collaborative project - people should choose whether they participate or not. But they give people no choice in the matter.
Ah, I see. Your point is fair. Making people participate is hardly fair or even reasonable. There should be something one can do to stop this. My understanding is that courts have tended to side with privacy advocates versus corporate or even govt, etc. interests when it comes to citizens’ privacy rights.
Well I’m definitely going to look into this. I know other people are concerned about this site’s actions.
We’re not forcing anyone to participate, we go through every single edit on the wiki and nonconstructive edits are reverted pretty quickly. You can also log in and receive an email whenever a page you’re watching has been edited and see a before and after of the page.
That being said about 90% of the edits on AboutUs.org are constructive and spam is almost non-existant.
The information we gathered is publicly available in many places. The only difference is we’ll delete it if you want us to, nobody else will.
Scott
Scott says:
Pardon? Logging IN is participation. Quick edits are participation. Subscribing to edits is participation. Just visiting the site is participation. And all this stuff I MUST do if I want to keep my sites’ pages free from spam, flaming and keep my private info from being posted.
Scott says:
But you won’t delete the whole page. The title and page remains, and therefore remains subject to edit. My elderly mom’s address could appear any moment.
Look, some people like your wiki. Great. Let those people participate. But why don’t you people just admit that some people do not like it, for a variety of reasons. Recognize that our reasons are valid. Stop arguing with us and take down our goddam pages.
I don’t understand why you people are resorting to this (http://www.aboutus.org/index.php?title=AboutUs.org&diff=6498127&oldid=6478032).
Ray’s contact info is listed in the article. His private contact info is not necessary.
Surely you can take whatever opinion you want and NOT vandalise the site & be vindictive and petty at the same time.
Us people?
I’ve never once vandalised the site so I don’t know to whom you refer when you say ‘you people’. The only thing I’ve done on the site is to my own entries, which was to delete info I didn’t want listed, and to ask to be opted out.
It is more than just opinion. I simply do not want my sites listed on this fucking site, and I will do everything in my power to get them removed.
And I should remove your comment as spam, since you were too cowardly to leave your email (which doesn’t get published in the first place). If you like the site, great - you should be given the CHOICE to participate. I don’t like being forced.
Oh I see, Nathan is a gay Cancerian from Ottawa. Well if you’re gay and live in Ottawa, then no wonder you’re bitter.
Us people! We people!
We the people!
Nathan, as a fellow gay, but not one from Ottowa, I don’t understand the “you people” comment. Che is voicing her frustration at being included without choice and having her private contact information publicly published. You even say Ray’s private information is not necessary. Neither is Che’s.
Che, nor any of “us people” would ever vandalize someone else’s site.
That simply isn’t done.
Nope, I’ve never vandalised a website, even when I’ve been sorely tempted. I haven’t even seeded Conservapedia with ‘liberal bias’ and goodness me, it does sound like fun. But that’s their site, its for them, and if I want to make fun of them, I’ll do it from here. Same goes for aboutus. If I have a complaint, I’ll air it here - I don’t vandalize. Jackass.
I had to write the aboutus people AGAIN, because they’d included slaughtergrove in their directory. A site I THOUGHT wouldn’t be listed because there are no links to it on the net. It will one day be a promotional site for my novel but until then, it isn’t even live. Yet somehow, it ended up on fucking aboutus.
I got a letter back from Scott. You’re going to love this. He said something like, You can’t remove yourself from Google, why should we be any different?
Lets forget for a moment that this jackass is comparing his spammy, scraper, forced crowdsourcing site to Google. Oh yeah, they wish.
Delusions of grandeur aside, there are ways to remove your site from google. One good way is to piss google off, but there are more legitimate ways to get yourself delisted from Google’s directory.
Now lets get back to this grand comparison.
Google offers value to its users. Its search engine is the best in the world, and it offers many many free products of great value.
The aboutus wiki has no value. If someone wants to find out about a website, why not go to the website? Why go to a wiki that might contain flaming, spam and erroneous info that has been edited by any and everyone?
Nearly everyone on the web uses Google. Who, really, is going to use this aboutus wiki? I suspect ONLY the domain owners who keep vigil over their entries. And of course, people who end up there by accident because Ray the Jackass has hijacked our keywords to exploit our hard work, and his entries appear alongside our legitimate sites on google.
Anyone who can’t see what he’s playing at (read: Nathan from Ottawa) needs to wake up and smell the spam.
And I know “you people” must be thinking, wow Che, you must have a great web-stats program if you can tell whether a commenter is gay or not, and what sign he is.
Well I’d love to pretend that my web-stats are as psychic as I am, but actually, I got all that information from…. you guessed it. AboutUs.
hahahahaha….
And you wonder why I don’t want to be listed.
There are some great posts here reflecting what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway so google can work its wonders…
Mr Ray King of aboutus.org, please just cut the sickening pretence and stop using different names to leave your blatant spin here and everywhere else that I see people have posted disgusted messages about you and your nasty online projects. Your desperate endeavour to try and legitimatise your spammy and deceptive site is not working one tiny bit.
In essence aboutus.org is a CONTENT & KEYWORD STEALING SPAM MACHINE with absolutely no legitimate reason for being other than what it does…
What DOES it do?
Well, it clearly POISONS SEARCH ENGINE results by flooding them with OTHER PEOPLES content and keywords. Thus it HIJACKS other peoples search results and deliberately misleads web users into mistakenly landing on “aboutus.org†instead of the site they thought they were going. This is blatant deception and in turn of course makes aboutus seem very popular giving it no doubt huge traffic but for all the wrong reasons.
Despite your excuses and presumptions Raymond, it’s quite clear that this entire process is absolutely DELIBERATE and totally unethical if not illegal as you well know.
Simply put, aboutus.org HAS NO PURPOSE AND NO POSITIVE EFFECTS ON EITHER WEB OWNERS OR WEB USERS. The only actual “content†it offers is stolen from everyone else.
Yay, go WIKI!… You clearly understand the concept so well, or is it just that it makes a highly convenient concept for you to HIDE your immoral practises behind…
If your site was genuinely a “WIKI†or even “FULLY EDITABLE†as you clearly state, then you would allow people to do just that. However you do not. It is not currently possible to remove robot harvested (stolen) entries in their entirety. If you try to remove them partially, they are put back. Currently the only way to remove an entry is to apparently email aboutus with a nice request.
…Oh dear, were to many people removing their stolen content so you had to think of a way to stop it? Yep.
What’s that, you want to harvest my email address as well? I see, so you steel my content, deliberately poison my SEO efforts by hijacking search results with misleading stolen content and keywords, then you want me to email you nicely asking you to stop? Wow, you really are a joker.
How about YOU simply stop stealing other peoples hits, content, keywords and give everyone the opportunity to “OPT IN†to your silly little scheme. No? Why not then?
Surely if your site has any kind of genuine purpose (and no nasty negative effects on search engines, site owners and web users) then I’m sure you’ll be swamped with people eagerly adding their own useful entries to aboutus?
Yeah right, the fact that you resorted to STEALING all of your content with bots from day one says it all really. Your site would be about 3 pages in size without everyone elses stolen content, and no one would care a less about adding their info. Or was no one supposed to spot that?
How about I set up a bogus semi WIKI just like yours, but I’ll call it about aboutRAYMOND and simply harvest all of the complaints off the web about you? There’s plenty of them…
Lets do something about it!!!
I encourage anyone who finds this to report aboutus.org to google for being both deceptive, spammy and for it’s deliberate and constant poisoning / contaminating of useful or genuine search results. Like the rest of us, this is something google truly hate.
In google simply type “google spamâ€, then click on the first result.
Maybe one day all of the pointless crappy sites like this will be excluded from search results for the benefit of ALL web users, or at least put out of the way in their own pointless TRASH category.
Ray, it must be a great feeling to be detested by so many around the world. What a great contribution you are making to the universe. Sleep well with all those good vibes.
This has been fun ;-)
We have a law in the UK called the Data Protection Act 1998 which means it is illegal to hold personal information on anyone without their permission - whether electronic or otherwise. Even if you did give permission you can withdraw it at any time and they HAVE to remove your details.
Surely there must be similar laws for companies and servers located in Washington, US?
Thanks for dropping by Jonathan. Your comments are welcome.This issue STILL pisses me off.
Yep, I’m familiar with the Data Protection Act in the UK, Zappo. But the issue of aboutus.org is a little more titchy. Because they’re scraping the info from already public files (the WHOIS directory) there seems to be some confusion as to whether they can legally publish it or not. (though the terms of use of WHOIS states they cannot).
But the publishing of private info is just ONE problem with aboutus