Living in glass data houses

Even though I knew this data existed, seeing it spatially displayed so I could easily get the scoop on all my neighbors made me uneasy. Straight from DirectionsMag.com:

Mathew Kane, a doctoral student in the Indiana University School of

Informatics, has generated an interesting Google mashup.



He extracted publicly available donor information from the non-profit

Fundrace Project, an "online resource that details and maps donors' information derived

from records on file with the Federal Election Commission from the 2004

elections," and made it mappable at the individual donor level.



The point of the project (press release here) was to expose data that people consider private, but is actually part of the public record. All you have to do is key in a ZIP Code and you'll get a map showing those who donated there. Click on a pin and you'll get the donor's name, address, amount given, and to which 2004 presidential candidate.