WOT: Web of Trust
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| Against Intuition, Inc. | |
|---|---|
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| Type | Website Reputation Rating |
| Founded | July 2006 |
| Headquarters |  Helsinki, Finland |
| Industry | Internet Security |
| Website | www.mywot.com |
Web of Trust (WOT) is an website reputation rating system accessible through a browser add-on. Ratings submitted by individual users are combined with other information to provide community ratings. The resulting pooled rating of a company or website can be checked before browsing to a potentially harmful site.
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[edit] Browser integration
Users can download the free WOT browser add-on. After installation, a WOT icon appears in their browser's navigation toolbar, next to the address bar. Once the user navigates to a site they want to rate, they click the WOT icon. This will open a rating window.
[edit] Availability
The user interface comes in 10 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish or Finnish. WOT is a free browser add-on that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. WOT is available for PC, MAC and Linux. A colorblind accessible version of WOT is also available.
[edit] Community Rating System
The user ratings are combined with data from automated blacklist services. The WOT system processes the data and produces a reputation rating for each website.
WOT members can rate a website using four components:
- Trustworthiness - The "poor" rating indicates Internet scams like lottery or identity theft risks, credit card fraud, phishing, spyware, adware, malware or computer viruses. The site may obtain a rating of "unsatisfactory" if it contains annoying advertisements, excessive pop-ups, or content that makes the browser crash.
- Vendor reliability - Rates whether the site is safe for buying and selling, or for business transactions in general. A "poor" rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.
- Privacy - Tells whether the site owner can be trusted, if it's safe to supply an email address, and download files. A "poor" rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.
- Child safety - Indicates whether the site contains age-inappropriate material of a sexual, hateful, or violent nature, or content that encourages dangerous or illegal activities.
[edit] The Website Reputation Scorecard
The Website Reputation Scorecard was introduced with WOT version 3. The scorecard shows data on popularity, a link to the WHOIS domain entry, detailed rating information with graphics, and a section for user comments and references. The references come from negative sources such as phishing and spam black lists or positive sources like del.ici.ous, Digg, or Wikipedia.
[edit] WOT Rating Icons
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After using a popular search engine like Google, a tiny icon appears beside the link—green for go, yellow for proceed with caution and red for stop. WOT warns about sites that can damage computer hard drives or cause other trouble. WOT ratings are shown on Google, Yahoo!, Gmail, Wikipedia, Digg, del.icio.us, AOL, MSN and other popular sites.
[edit] Rating quality
The accuracy of the resulting ratings depends on the accuracy of the submitted opinions.
Some WOT users may not be knowledgeable enough about the personal data management of a website to provide accurate ratings concerning privacy, this could lead to good sites being rated bad and vice-versa [1]
[edit] Manipulation
There is potential for users to manipulate the system.[2]
These issues have, in part, been mitigated by giving the ratings of frequent users a greater influence.
[edit] Privacy
WOT has a strict privacy policy, and they claim to follow it to the letter. The MyWOT website states, "The WOT add-on collects information only for computing website ratings, performing statistical analysis, and preventing abuse of our service. Any information that is no longer needed for these purposes is deleted."[3]
[edit] WOT Research
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According to a study carried out by WOT [4][5], the least reliable websites for Internet users are websites offering Adult content, software and entertainment. The study is based on analysis of 18 million websites rated by the WOT user community, collected in January 2008. The information covers websites with a poor reputation and active website traffic.
[edit] Three Most Dangerous Categories
The study revealed the largest three categories among risky websites:
- Adult Content: 28% of the dangerous sites analyzed
- Software: 27% (free and licensed software sold and downloaded over the Internet)
- Entertainment: 16% (movies, games, music, screensavers, smileys)
Other dangerous categories include search sites, digital marketing providers, and consumer research sites making empty promises of free gifts or money.
A list of the 50 most dangerous sites can be seen here.
[edit] Company History
Against Intuition was founded in Finland in 2006 by two graduate students, Timo Ala-Kleemola and Sami Tolvanen. After a year of beta testing, the WOT user community accumulated reputation data for more than 16 million sites worldwide, and they have since increased that number to 17.5 million and growing.[citation needed]
Headed by Esa Suurio, Against Intuition, Inc. focuses on developing and providing software and services for the WOT community and on promoting the community's goals. The company is based in Helsinki.
[edit] Recognition
- Best B2C Service WOT won the "Best B2C service" category in Grand One 2007, the biggest and most important digital media competition in Finland. There were a total of 215 submissions to the competition, 44 of them in the consumer service category.[6]
[edit] References
- ^ Keep yourself safe from internet scams. Retrieved on 2008-05-02.
- ^ Web of Trust is the Robert De Niro of Reputation Sites. Retrieved on 2007-12-04.
- ^ WOT Privacy Policy.
- ^ WOT study sheds light on the dark corners of the Internet. Retrieved on 2007-02-26.
- ^ Statistics: November 2007. Retrieved on 2007-11-26.
- ^ Grand One 07 (Finnish language). Retrieved on 2007-12-03.
