Re: Does your Certifying Authority have a clue who you are? Do they care?

On Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:28:05 CST, Adi Linden said:

While the ssl certificate is meant to verify the owners identity, as a consumer I would never trust a ssl certificate for that purpose. It does provide a reasonable effort to keep information between me and the server confidential. That's worth something, I guess.

So what does the PKI actually buy you that using a throwaway self-signed cert doesn't provide?