Data mine online profiles with one keypress

Glenn Jones' Identify Firefox browser plugin uses Google's Social Graph API to correlate identities between social networking and media-sharing sites. Says ReadWriteWeb:

Jones's tool is a Firefox plug-in you can evoke from any web page that has links tagged rel="me". Just click the control key and the "i" key to get a pop-up offering information put together from all around the web about the person the page is associated with. It works on Twitter profile pages, LinkedIn pages, blogs with good markup and other profile pages.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page.

Explicit is the potential for data mining personally identifiable information online:

The tool is clearly very useful as a way to learn more about people whose usernames you come across online.

You may be a Canadian citizen. Then again, you may not...

The WSJ reports that an amendment to Canada's Citzenship Act automatically restores nationality to many children of Canadian citizens forced to renounce it or born outside the country, and to their children's children:

Eligible individuals automatically become Canadian citizens. But they don't get proof of that citizenship unless they apply for it, meaning other countries -- including those that allow people to be citizens of only one nation -- won't be alerted, according to the immigration office spokeswoman. Those people also may renounce their citizenship rights, she said.

The citizenship bonanza is the byproduct of a decades-long struggle by a motley group of people who claim they were unfairly denied or lost their Canadian nationality. Canadian families who crossed the border in 1947 to 1977 to have their babies in a U.S. hospital found those children weren't recognized as Canadians unless the families registered them with the government. Some foreign brides of Canadian World War II servicemen lost their citizenship if they stayed out of the country for a decade or more.

Then there are the Canadian Mennonites who moved to Mexico in the 1920s to the 1960s. When their children and grandchildren returned to Canada, many found their nationality unclear.

Some such cases languished in litigation for years. Others surfaced in 2007, when new U.S. rules requiring passports for travel between Canada and the U.S. uncovered significant numbers of people who thought they were Canadian, but weren't.