Hi. Does anyone else find this slightly disturbing?
“NetIdentity was founded in 1996 as Mailbank.com after the company discovered that 70% of the U.S. population shares one of only 9,000 last names. Using a computerized phone directory, NetIdentity sorted out the most common surnames and began buying them. … NetIdentity controls versions of the surnames of 69% of the US population.”
Of course, my last name is probably in the bottom 1% of last names by commonality in the United States, so i’m not worried so much as i am disturbed. Although, i suppose with however many hundreds of thousands of “Smith”s or “Miller”s or “Donaldson”s there are in America, i’d rather have some benign webmail service own my family name than some teenaged netizen with a webcam and a low SAT score. However, that’s only the case in America – in some other countries it’s a different story.