Five years ago, back in 2011, we wrote a series of articles about Web of Trust (WOT). In those articles we questioned the trustworthiness of Web of Trust and advised our readers NOT to trust Web of Trust.<\/p>\n
We showed how a few WOT “community” members manipulated WOT ratings by using automated scripts and bots, and were able to get legitimate sites of WOT’s “WARNING” list. WOT’s community steered users away from legitimate sites and unfairly hurt a lot of small Web sites and small internet businesses.<\/p>\n
You can read our WOT-related articles from the links below:<\/p>\n
www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wot-can-we-say-see-we-told-you-so\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/dan-agrees-whats-up-with-wot\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/tag\/patsy-says-her-site-was-ruined-by-wot\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wot-needs-to-control-its-community\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wot-the-web-of-trust\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n We warned our users about WOT five years ago and strongly recommended they not trust WOT and to remove\u00a0the WOT browser add-on.<\/p>\n Five years later, it comes to light that what we wrote about WOT was not only true, but there was even more going on with WOT than what we suspected five years ago. Today, it was revealed( 09 November 2016) in this article<\/span> which appeared on MakeUseOf web site, that WOT was collecting user data and selling it.<\/p>\n Here’s an excerpt from that article:<\/p>\n If you have Web of Trust installed, you should consider uninstalling it right now. Why? Because Web of Trust, also known as WOT, has been caught collecting and selling user data. Even worse, this data hasn\u2019t always been successfully anonymized.<\/p>\n Web of Trust (WOT) is a tool designed to help you browse the web safely. Users rate websites based on different metrics, and websites are then assigned a safety rating. Anyone with WOT installed on their web browser can then instantly get an idea of which websites are safe to visit.<\/p>\n The problem, as discovered by German broadcaster NDR<\/a>, is that WOT collects data about its users, and then sells it onto third parties. This part is all openly admitted in the Web of Trust Privacy Policy<\/a>. However, this states that the data is \u201cnon-identifiable,\u201d and that appears to not be the case.<\/p>\n NDR investigators were able to link the so-called anonymized data to individual users…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Five years ago we advised you not to\u00a0trust Web of Trust … and it turns out that we were right… again.<\/p>\n See? We told you so!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" See? We Told You So! Five years ago, back in 2011, we wrote a series of articles about Web of Trust (WOT). In those articles we questioned the trustworthiness of Web of Trust and advised our readers NOT to trust Web of Trust. We showed how a few WOT “community” members manipulated WOT ratings by using automated scripts\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1462,1433,1678,1,1426,1670,1656],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11815"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11815"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11818,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11815\/revisions\/11818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}