- Feb 22, 2013
- 451
I was a user WOT from 2011 until today. I uninstalled this add-on.
With curiosity I expect, until this matter is cleared up completely.
With curiosity I expect, until this matter is cleared up completely.
Any decent alternatives? Heard there's something called Traffic light or similar?
WOT was a one of a kind extension and I have not found anything like it other than Webutation, but it doesn't work on FF at all and I read where some think it's abandonware!
Thank you for the clarification James, it's much appreciated.@ZeroDay: Well technically yes for gathering reputation ratings only, so that to balance the final ratings of a website by Webutation.
It also contains 3rd party source like HpHost to come up immediate verdict already.
MyWOT Team said:Dear users,
Thank you for your patience. We apologize for our delayed public reply and any anxiety this incident has caused. It has taken us some time to understand what has happened and how best to ensure we protect our users.
We take our obligations to you very seriously. While we deployed great effort to remove any data that could be used to identify individual users, it appears that in some cases such identification remained possible, albeit for what may be a very small number of WOT users.
Of course, if the data allows the identification of even a small number of WOT users, we consider that unacceptable, and will be taking immediate measures to address this matter urgently as part of a full security assessment and review.
Additionally, after Mozilla notified us that they were removing the WOT add-on from their store (pending responses to a set of questions / proposed changes they sent to us), we voluntarily removed the WOT add-on from all other platforms, including the Chrome store, in order to resolve this matter properly and comprehensively.
To that end, we are taking the following steps:
We will spend the coming weeks making the changes to WOT which will ensure we are back on the right track. You, our community of users are the real power behind WOT and we will continue serving you as such.
- Reviewing our privacy policy to determine which changes need to be made in order to enhance and ensure that our users privacy rights are properly addressed.
- For the user browsing data used to enable WOT’s website reputation service, we intend to provide users the ability to opt-out from having such data saved in our database or shared. This opt-out will be available from the settings menu, as we want to provide each user with a clear choice at all times.
- For people who agree to let us use their browsing data in order to support WOT, we will implement a complete overhaul of our data ‘cleaning’ process, to optimize our data anonymization and aggregation objectives to minimize any risk of exposure for our users.
The problem I have with their reply is that they talk about how they 'deployed great effort to remove any data that could be used to identify individual users' but they failed to do this properly, and what has happened should have never happened in the first place. If they did it properly this problem wouldn't have happened.So here is a response about all this mess from the WOT staff:
Source: To the WOT community | Forum | WOT (Web of Trust)
I think you got it wrong.Sorry that I am confused when nobody else seems to be but I thought this was why we used Malwarebytes? I thought that was what it does, warns me of unsafe websites. Why are people looking for an alternative to WOT on THIS forum? There must be something obvious I am clueless about. An answer would be appreciated thanks.
What do you mean?Sorry that I am confused when nobody else seems to be but I thought this was why we used Malwarebytes? I thought that was what it does, warns me of unsafe websites. Why are people looking for an alternative to WOT on THIS forum? There must be something obvious I am clueless about. An answer would be appreciated thanks.
- Block phishing attacksI have installed Netcraft which is mainly for blocking phishing links (it did good when I tested it)
I'm aware it blocks other things, but it didn't do well against malc0de links but did very well with phishing links- Block phishing attacks
- Block XSS attacks
- Warn about suspicious sites
https://i.imgur.com/KE3b69l.png
I forgot to mention Netcraft toolbar.It is my companion for so many years that I forget I have it installed!. The best anti-phishing addon so farI have installed Netcraft which is mainly for blocking phishing links (it did good when I tested it)
The problem I have with their reply is that they talk about how they 'deployed great effort to remove any data that could be used to identify individual users' but they failed to do this properly, and what has happened should have never happened in the first place. If they did it properly this problem wouldn't have happened.
If they thought for one second that what they were doing was incorrect and could end up causing problems like what has happened then they should have never started selling data in the first place, and if they knew what they were doing with removing identifiable data and carried out their plans properly, then this would have never happened.
Out of interest, did WOT ever actually specify to users that they were selling the browsing history in the first place (identifiable or not)?
In my books this is a big no and that tells me everything I need to know about them... It's one thing to collect data and sell it on to make profit even with permission, but it's another to do it behind the backs of your customers (whether it's legal or not doesn't come into question, it's about being ethical and loyal to your fan-base) and mess it up so they can be personally identified.Nopes, not in the least.