Chat with WhoWhere.com

[Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>]

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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

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