Watching the watchmen
Yesterday, I spoke with Mark Opzoomer. Mark was the MD of Yahoo! Europe between 2001 and 2003. Now he’s involved in a number of ventures, but I was talking to him about his participation with Garlik. Garlik is set to launch as an online privacy service later this year. The idea is that they’ll scour the web looking for the information that’s stored about you or connected with you: your old MySpace profile, those posts you made to a newsgroup and the items stored in other public databases. Having compiled a report, they’ll give you an option to try to have your tracks erased or hidden. “People don’t realise quite how much you can discover about themselves from public sources. We want to raise that awareness and also hand back a little control.”
I asked him about MySpace’s apparent victory over Yahoo! in the recent Hitwise ratings. “Well, MySpace should make around $350mn in sales revenue this year. Yahoo! will make about $4bn. That’s quite a difference. And it means that Yahoo! will have the investment opportunity to add better content and services.”
Lanjut →