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Anonymous
"Web of Trust" addon is selling your browser history 2016-11-05 06:02:25 Post No.
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"Web of Trust" addon is selling your browser history 2016-11-05 06:02:25 Post No.
[Report] Image search: [Google]
"Web of Trust" addon is selling your browser history
Anonymous
2016-11-05 06:02:25
Post No.
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>Some extensions, like Web of Trust, provide users with a service that requires access to every site visited in the browser. The extension is designed to offer security and privacy guidance for sites visited in the browser.
>The data that Panorama bought from brokers contained more than ten billion web addresses. The data was not fully anonymized, as the team managed to identify people in various ways.
>The web address, URL, for instance revealed user IDs, emails or names for instance. This was the case for PayPal (email), for Skype (user name) or an online check-in of an airline.
>What's particularly worrying is that the information did not stop there. It managed to uncover information about police investigations, the sexual preferences of a judge, internal financial information of companies, and searches for drugs, prostitutes, or diseases.
>Links may lead to private storage spaces on the Internet that, when improperly secured, may give anyone with knowledge of the URL access to the data.
>It is trivial to search the data for online storage services for instance to reveal those locations and check whether they are publicly accessible.
>Panorama reports that Web of Trust logs collected information such as time and date, location, web address and user ID. The information are sold to third-parties who may sell the data again to interested companies.
>WOT notes on its website that it hands over data to third-parties but only in anonymized form. The team of reporters managed to identify several user accounts however which suggests that the anonymization does not work as intended.
>The extension has been downloaded over 140 million times. While the data set that the researchers bought included only German user information, it is likely that data sets are available for users from other regions of the world.
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/01/browsing-history-sold/
Legit?
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>WOT
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>>57394110
>downloaded over 140 million times
Surely some faggots here use it
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No way to trust any addons.
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>>57394128
Back in the olden days when the internet wasn't as focused on ads and tracking scripts I installed it because it sounded useful for avoiding malware. I uninstalled it shortly afterward because it was just crowd sourced site rankings and a lot of the rankings were questionable.
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Used it before and it's terrible, sites that are completely safe get blocked because people don't like the opinions on it. Storefront, for example, is blocked by WOT because users report it as being malicious.
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It gets better
>The WOT add-on can execute arbitrary code on any page, including privileged browser pages. Impact and severity: Critical. If WOT wants to, they can do anything ranging from stealing banking credentials to installing malware on the user's computer. At the time of analysis, this functionality was not abused.
https://gist.github.com/Rob--W/bda5f28a0ac3b877780c6665bbed2e1b
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Holy shit, I installed it years ago and forget I had it, gonna get rid of this shit
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>pale meme freezes when opening some sites
>disable wot
>no more freezing
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>>57395023
>Stormfront
/pol/ please leave.
>>57394076
>security and privacy guidance
Wow, that sounds absolutely useless. What kind of person uses this service? "I want privacy and I don't mind this third party monitoring everything I do to give me tips on it"? That sounds idiotic. Surely there must be more to it.
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what the hell is web of trust though
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>>57397814
this
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>>57394296
Did it for the same reason. It's actually helped me dodging a lot of shady websites. Although, I uninstalled it yesterday because of this.
To some extent, I think it might be better to just keep it, since it still does assist in avoiding viruses if one often visits new websites, but, that of course, comes with a hefty price of privacy loss.
Still, the moment you log on the internet, you're bound to be exposed anyhow; I suppose it's more of a principle than a practical one.
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>>57394076
The joke is that you can opt out, you just have to check the settings
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http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/05/mozilla-and-google-remove-wot-extension/
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>>57399056
You can use a simple bookmarklet to accomplish basically the same thing
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/05/mozilla-and-google-remove-wot-extension/#comment-4023307
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>>57399578
Huh, so simple, yet never thought of it.
Thanks, anon.
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>>57394076
Used it once back in the day.
Stopped because the reviews are idiotic. Some of my fringe sites got blocked for "hate speech." 4chan was never blocked.
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>>57394076
Oh fug, I had this thing in my wrobser
Am I watching list now
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>>57401737
No, just on a database
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>>57401737
b o t n e t
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>>57394076
I uninstalled this over a year ago for being redundant. HTTPS by Default, Bluhell Firewall, uMatrix, and Privacy Settings are all that are required. Just yesterday I was on Xvideos and accidentally mistyped the preference "general.useragent.override" when changing the UA to iphone and got sent the desktop version of the site. A pop-up of some kind opened up which Bluhell blocked. Very good addon it is.
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>>57395832
Isn't this true of any addon though?
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I had it for like 4 years now
just uninstalled
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>>57399469
Holy shit
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fuck, i had this for ages :(
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>>57394076
>mfw never had it
Did I cheat the system?
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>>57403967
This
I've been just fine with out using sketch services like this. Seriously?! Web of Trust?! That name alone screams bullshit
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>>57404040
Apparently it was a sorta legitimate service until like last year when they added spyware to it.
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>>57394076
does anybody seriously us wot?
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Any alternative to WOT?
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>>57405171
Used to, but then I realized that the ratings were mainly user based, and forums where there was not possible risk were red because of wot users having their feelings hurt that such sites allowed different opinions from theirs to be posted.
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>>57405357
Common sense.
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I used to shitpost negative ratings for my own websites on WOT because it was awful.
Completely unmoderated and mostly used by autists who would blame their shit PC as "shte-hosted malware" and nobody could ever spell.
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>>57405372
This
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Yeah I used to use it back in the FF 3.6 days, long since stopped. Glad others have stopped too.
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How do we know it doesn't steal passwords as well?
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>>57406024
Albeit speculative, Is it wrong at this point to question wots credibility and assume worst possible scenario?
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>>57394076
Who cares, it was noobware anyways
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