Reviews for Web of Trust, MyWOT/WOT: Website Reputation Rating – Add-ons for Firefox (en-US)

OS: Windows 7

Firefox: 91.0.1

For Developer: send me an address to send picture of the button if you don’t know which button I mean.

Very useful app. The latest version sometimes seems broken. For example, pressing the button that shows up on Firefox (on the button bar next to the URL address) sometimes gives something similar to this:

300: jar:file:///K:/Firefox/yvi01elg.default-esr/extensions/{a0d7ccb3-214d-498b-b4aa-0e8fda9a7bf7}.xpi!/
200: filename content-length last-modified file-type
201: META-INF/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: _locales/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: addReview.html 2781 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: error.html 842 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: images/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: libs/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: loggedOut.html 2545 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: manifest.json 4489 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: offering.html 1711 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: options.html 1666 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: popup.html 1476 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: presettings.html 1550 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: resources/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: scripts/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: slider.html 5790 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE
201: styles/ 0 Mon, 31 Dec 2279 22:00:00 GMT DIRECTORY
201: systempage.html 933 Thu, 29 Nov 2279 22:00:00 GMT FILE

Раніше активно використовував цей додаток, сьогодні планував його встановити і почав шукати, натрапив на опис у Wikipedia:

WOT Services has partnerships with Mail.ru, Facebook, hpHosts, LegitScript, Panda Security, Phishtank, GlobalSign and TRUSTe.

In November 2022, a German state media investigation found that WOT Services had secretly collected personal user details and sold or licensed this information to unidentified third-party businesses and entities for data monetization purposes. This activity breached the privacy rules and guidelines set by several browsers. As a result, the browser add-on was involuntarily removed from Mozilla Firefox’s add-on store, and voluntarily removed from other browsers’ add-on/extension stores. WOT was eventually reinstated.

On November 1, 2022, German public broadcasting station NDR reported the results of an investigation by in-house journalists, showing that WOT collected, recorded, analyzed and sold user-related data to third parties. The data obtained was traceable to WOT and could be assigned to specific individuals, despite WOT’s claim that user data was anonymized. The NDR investigative journalism report was based on freely available sample data, and revealed that sensitive private information of more than 50 users could be retrieved. The information included websites visited, account names and email addresses, potentially revealing user illnesses, sexual preferences and drug consumption. The journalists also reconstructed a media company’s confidential revenue data, and details about an ongoing police investigation.

German media contacted WOT Services with the results of the investigation prior to publication of the report. WOT declined to comment on the findings.

Тому ні, дякую, зашкварний додаток я не буду ставити.

BEWARE — SPYWARE

https://uk.pcmag.com/web-sites/85858/web-of-trust-browser-extension-cannot-be-trusted

«The NDR investigation discovered that while you have the WOT extension installed, extensive data collection is going on in the background. But WOT not only collects and records data on a per-user basis, it then analyzes and sells it on to third parties.»

«The WOT Privacy Policy states that your IP, geographic location, device type, operating system, browser, the date and time, Web addresses, and overall browser usage are all collected, but that it is «non-identifiable.» But NDR found that it was a simple task to link the anonymized data to individual users of the service. The data retrieved included:

Account name
Mail address
Travel plans
Illnesses
Sexual preference
Drug consumption
Confidential company information
Ongoing police investigations
Browser surfing activity including all sites visited»

*NEW REVIEW*

5 years ago I gave up with this add-on, because it was slowing my browser to crawl. Now it was even worse, because right after installing the whole machine was stuck so badly that I couldn’t even switch from GUI to text console (I’m using Linux — it takes something really wrong for this to happen) and try run «killall -9 firefox-bin». And the HDD kept churning something (I guess it was swapping! I have 16GB RAM, my machine almost never needs to use swap space!).

Finally I killed the power (thanks a lot, I had a lot of stuff open in other applications! Thank god FireFox offered to reload my crashed session).

When FireFox then loaded, I went straight to the add-on manager and disabled WOT. I didn’t want to see if it would behave any better after restart — I don’t like messing with rebooting, especially by force from power button!

I gave you 1 star last time and now I would love to give you zero, if possible, because that was not acceptable!

Otherwise your add-on is great, and might run smoothly on this machine, if it’s code was *written well*. Your add-on after all is not that complicated, it shouldn’t have ANY effect on speed. And my current machine also has add-ons that run smoothly despite of being quite heavy on resources.

*MY OLD REVIEW FROM 5 YEARS AGO*
First I really thought I was going to like it. I’ve used WOT through NoScript to check which sites to allow and sometimes to check the site I’m on via FlagFox…
But under only couple hours I noticed that my whole browser had slowed down, I was getting «script busy» errors, and yes, they were from this plugin.
It’s not a brand new machine, only a year old or so, I think it’s 1,6Ghz dual-core Atom CPU netbook with Windows 7 (uh, I normally over install linux right away) and with FireFox 30.0
Disabling the plugin fixed the problem with one swift browser reboot.

WOT Services was caught and widely reported for taking whatever information people provided about themselves plus the sort of information about the ISP associated IP address people queried WOT from, regarding the trustworthiness of other Web sites. (Can you say «pernicious hypocrites»?)

I would suggest that anyone reading reviews of WOT here or elsewhere do a little research about the organization and what they were up to as of 2022, and quite possibly years before and now after they got caught.

You cannot say you have not been warned, repeatedly. I am merely conveying the same sort of bad news that several others have been posting for many months, and just got tired of seeing all the short, «WOT is wonderful!» reviews that do not even mention much less address the issue of how WOT was doing exactly the sort of thing they purported to be protecting (many not very Internet-savvy) people who went to them for advice on unsafe or unsavory sites lurking behind URLs they knew little about.

Hint: when any good or service that has been around awhile suddenly starts getting a lot of strong criticism for valid reasons, while any negative comments are constantly diluted by a steady stream of vapid reviews claiming the product is better than sliced bread, cuter than a week-old puppy, and might even bring peace to the world, end poverty, and cure cancer in the near future (OK, I am exaggerating — a little), why would you trust them any more than you would some strange clown who was wandering around your neighborhood handing out candy to little kids?

Regards,
FractalZ

Taken directly from their Privacy Policy: «When you install and use the WOT app or WOT extension, we also collect from you automatically… Internet Protocol Address…Search engine results page (keyword, order/index of results, link of result, title, description, ads); web pages visited and time stamp of the visit;»

This obvious breach of privacy mingled with the fact that they were caught red-handed in selling it is UNACCEPTABLE.

WOT has a flawed rating method.

If your site is hosted as a sub-domain of a shared domain owned by your hosting service, the poor reputation is inherited from the parent domain.

This means that WOT automatically and immediately gives your site a bad reputation just based on supposition, without even bothering to actually look at your website…

So, WOT will consider your site «guilty by association» from day one!

Is this a fair and trustworthy method? No.

Following are WOT instructions on how you can get more/improve ratings for your website:
«If you want to improve the reputation, we recommend asking your friends, business partners, blog followers, or customers to submit ratings for the site. You can either ask them to use the WOT add-on, or simply point them to your site’s scorecard where they can rate the site after creating an account.»
How reliable and trustworthy is that?
Anyone wealthy enough can bribe lots of people to summit ratings in order to get a good site reputation at WOT…
Or anyone wealthy enough can bribe lots of people to summit bad ratings in order to get the competitor’s website a bad reputation at WOT…

But since you’re using the sub-domain of a free web hosting, you’re probably on a low budget, which means you can’t afford to bribe lots of people, and so your site gets toasted by the gang at WOT.

Giants like Facebook and the likes will become even more dominant, while smaller innovative and honest web sites will get a bad reputation from the start, regardless how clean and malware-free they might be.

Virtually anybody can register at WOT, you don’t even have to verify your email address or be proven as a site customer to review a website, even kids can end up rating websites…

The rating service does not distinguish between ‘distrust a website’ and ‘dislike a website’, so a website can get a poor trustfulness rating just because its published opinion is not mainstream or doesn’t fit the reviewers’ political agenda.
This makes WOT ratings highly subjective and extremely politically biased. This is a threat to freedom of speech, since they can get sites banned from Facebook.

Furthermore:
An investigation by German TV channel NDR has uncovered a serious breach of privacy by the Web Of Trust (WOT) service, which over 140 million Web surfers trust to help keep them safe online…
See also the following Guardian article, titled: » ‘Anonymous’ browsing data can be easily exposed, researchers reveal», where WOT sold a database of 3 million users, which were then de-anonymised.
Because of that Mozila has also blocked WOT add-ons older than 2022-01-20.