  In the fight against tax evaders and other cheats, governments seek to gather
more information about their citizens. In this paper we claim that this
increased transparency, combined with ineptitude, or corruption, can lead to
widespread violations of privacy, ultimately harming law-abiding individuals
while helping those engaged in criminal activities such as stalking, identity
theft and so on. In this paper we survey a number of data sources administrated
by the Greek state, offered as web services, to investigate whether they can
lead to leakage of sensitive information. Our study shows that we were able to
download significant portions of the data stored in some of these data sources
(scraping). Moreover, for those data sources that were not amenable to scraping
we looked at ways of extracting information for specific individuals that we
had identified by looking at other data sources. The vulnerabilities we have
discovered enable the collection of personal data and, thus, open the way for a
variety of impersonation attacks, identity theft, confidence trickster attacks
and so on. We believe that the lack of a big picture which was caused by the
piecemeal development of these data sources hides the true extent of the
threat. Hence, by looking at all these data sources together, we outline a
number of mitigation strategies that can alleviate some of the most obvious
attack strategies. Finally, we look at measures that can be taken in the longer
term to safeguard the privacy of the citizens.
