Raúl Santos
I just received a text message from Cláudia, suggesting a name for our company and I immediately tried to register the domain name - no luck, it’s already taken.
Since it’s not being used, I accessed the whois page of the registrar, to see if there was any possibility of buying the domain back. That’s when I noticed something new on the page: a link to AboutUs.org with info on the site. I clicked the link but there was no info about that domain.
I noticed the domain was specified on the URL, so I tried replacing it with other domains I know and I instantly got the title for the website, an excerpt from it, the languages used on the site, among other stuff, including the address, phone number and e-mail address of the site owner.
I don’t know how they managed to cross all the available information about so many sites but this is a bit scary…
The best part is that they don’t have a way to contact them (so one could request that his/her personal information is removed from the website) and they claim that “All content is available under the terms of the GFDL and/or the CC By-SA License”. Taking into account that thy have excerpts of other websites on their website, this is stretching a bit too far, in my opinion.
If you have a website, I’d recommend you check http://aboutus.org/yourdomain.com and see what information it has on you. You may not like what you find…
EDIT: OK, so they do have a way to get personal info removed: edit the information (it’s a Wiki), which was the first thing I did but my information is still available in the Wiki’s history, so it’s not really a solution…