-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- So we did lunch. They even paid. I had a turkey club sandwich and a strawberry/banana smoothie. At this time, I cannot discuss (publicly) much of what was said, but I can say that some progress was made. * There is not currently a "deny" list. I.e., if you ask WhoWhere to delete your name, address, and phone number, they will usually do it within 48 hours, but it is entirely possible that an automated process will reenter your address the next day. They agree that this is something that should be fixed. * They do indeed run an undocumented web spider to search for email addresses. Soon, they will register it on the WebCrawler page and follow the Robot Exclusion Standard. However, they were not interested in shutting the robot down, or sharing the source code. * They deny association with the "WhoWhere Robot" probes operating out of Japan and Australia. I expressed concern that someone may have stolen their spider somehow. They'll look into it. * The person I talked to agreed that WhoWhere's initially writing programs to brute-force tens of thousands of addresses out of the okra.ucr.edu service was improper. I expressed concerns that the current version of their web crawler appeared to have no safeguards against a recurrence. * Certain other allegations were confirmed, denied, or confidential. * WhoWhere does seem to take concerns about the inappropriate disclosure of information that was never intended to be publicly available seriously. :-) * They do indeed have formal business relationships with ABI, InfoSeek, Switchboard, and Netscape (details on the Netscape relationship are not publicly available). * I did not feel at all threatened by remarks made as we were leaving. - -rich -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMZAs/Y3DXUbM57SdAQE7KQP/cvth6OaIopocvHM9dIEwkwDnEYqY5gZ0 QlJk00imT3nzBQTXffqZdq8I8lEpYhshibe0VPzAK0KgUthzE7/hyb12DKBQuNYz mGqkQRNcY0r9Fcg6dbl+pBPltf3XgOE7one1uziRvd12uL9skEyTMBcR41WiFs84 f+uKBfGD2qk= =hROh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----