| Industry | Internet safety |
|---|---|
| Founded | July 2006 |
| Headquarters | Helsinki, Finland |
| Website | www.mywot.com |
WOT Services, Ltd is a Finnish company that runs the partly crowdsourced Internet website reputation rating tool Web of Trust (WOT). The installed WOT browser add-on immediately shows its users the reputations of websites, which are calculated algorithmically through a combination of user ratings and data from other sources. The site reputations can also be viewed on the company website's scorecards.[1][2]
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WOT was founded in 2006 by Sami Tolvanen and Timo Ala-Kleemola, who wrote the WOT software as post-graduates at the University of Technology in Tampere, Finland. They launched the service officially in 2007, with serial entrepreneur and angel investor Esa Suurio as CEO. In November 2009 Suurio moved on to his next endeavor and was followed up by Vesa Perälä. Deborah Gerachis Salmi was CMO from March 2008 to October 2011 and was followed up by Anna-Leena Siliämaa.
WOT's free safe surfing tool has been downloaded more than 29 million times as of December 2011. The company has partnered with hpHosts, Facebook, Panda Security, LegitScript, Phishtank and TRUSTe.
The WOT browser add-on can be installed with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari. The add-on is open source. It does two things: (1) it sends user ratings to the WOT site, and (2) it displays the computed results via color-coded icons in the user's browser tool-bar and - only visible to add-on users - on the pages of Google, Gmail, Bing, Hotmail, Yahoo, Yandex, Mail.ru, Wikipedia, Facebook, Vkontakte and Twitter amongst others. The program software at WOT headquarters is not open source. It is designed to compute the measure of trust the rating users have in websites, enhanced with data from a number of third-party sources. The user rating system is meritocratic; the weight of ratings are algorithmically calculated for each user individually.
To generate revenue WOT licenses the use of its reputation database to other businesses, and sells "trust seals" and "reputation badges" to websites.
The rating tool has received mostly favorable reviews in the press, sometimes with mildly critical remarks.[3][4][5] Some people vent more harsh criticism, saying the system is too susceptible to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious efforts of biased users. The company claims the system is extremely difficult to abuse and says that attempts usually get noticed.[6]
On December 7, 2010, ten companies all associated to Ayman El-Difrawi aka Alec Difrawi in Orlando, Florida filed a lawsuit against WOT Services for defamation, violating rights, conspiracy and manipulating algorithms, among other claims, demanding WOT to remove ratings and comments for their numerous websites. WOT said to believe the case was completely baseless and suggested dismissing the case.[7] On December 8, 2011, (after 6 of 12 counts were voluntarily dismissed earlier) the Florida court granted WOT's motion to dismiss. The case was dismissed with prejudice. [8][9]