A few years ago, I joined a search engine called Mamma.com. This was before Google was omnipresent and monetizing every click you and I generated. At the same time, another company in my neck of the woods, called Zero Knowledge, raised something like $90M in VC. ZK’s mission was simple: to make users anonymous as they surfed the Web. The software made surfing the web slow and tedious, and then 9/11 killed the privilege of surfing anonymously on many sites. I’m pretty sure ZK went on to have a successful story as it repositioned itself… but:
More importantly, the mere premise that users valued privacy and anonymity was blown to smithereens as we left morsels of our information across a myriad of websites around the Web. continue reading...
