[wildcard-comments] It's also about Privacy

[Bob Seeman <bob@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting the 'Privacy Policy' at the bottom of Verisign's wildcard page:

"When you visit our Site Finder, our computers may automatically collect
statistics about your visit. This information does not identify you
personally. We may monitor statistics such as ... the visitor's IP address,
which pages a visitor views, from which domains our visitors come and ....

"If a cookie is used, our Site Finder will be able to "remember" information
about you ... until you disable or delete the cookie."

While this policy wording would be acceptable on another website, the big
difference here is that, by definition, 100% of the people who come to
Verisign's wildcard page do not intend to find it ... and everyone,
including Verisign, knows this. Therefore, nobody who goes to the wildcard
site can possibly be considered to be consenting to any policy, not the
least of which is for Verisign to collect the name of the site we mistyped,
our IP addresses or remember this and other information about us forever.

Bob Seeman