Only one comment... The article says that "... [people will] lend [Wowd] their computers and privacy for the purpose of searching the Web".
In fact, I would argue that the approach that Wowd uses is much, much better for personal privacy than centralized approaches.
Let's say that you use a toolbar issued by a major search company. Chances are, that toolbar is shipping back to some central location all the URLs that pass through your browser.
After being captured in this manner, the centralized search provider has a decision to make for any given URL: should they have seen the URL, or should they not have seen it? That is, your browser toolbar will be sending back URLs that are, in fact, quite private. You're counting on the centralized authority to recognize its mistake, after the fact, and you're counting on them to keep the private URLs to themselves! (Will the URLs be deleted? Or just kept but not used, for ever? If they're used, then how will they be used? Who knows!)
With Wowd, a private URL is never, ever shared off your computer. WIth Wowd, what happens is that when you visit a public web site, the URL for that site gets an anonymous vote, and then from some other point in the Wowd cloud of computers, the page pointed-to by that URL is retrieved and indexed. The page is not retrieved from your computer. There's no way to trace back from the retrieval of the page to the person who issued the nomination for the page.
No personal information is shared, no "fingerprints" are left in the system, and there's no way to trace back to any given user the pages that that user votes for in the system. This is actually a much better approach than what most people put up with today.
So in no way can Wowd be considered "spyware". Wowd protects individual identity much more effectively than centralized approaches ever could. At Wowd, we take privacy seriously, and have designed our architecture from the ground up to put you in control of the information that describes what you do and where you go on the web.
