WoT sells your browser history

[deya]

Latest statement from WOT, yesterday evening, on their forum;

https://www.mywot.com/en/forum/70818...-wot-community

[Remah]

I think that it is worth quoting their message. If they complete what they say then WOT will be even better for me.

Dear users,

Thank you for your patience. We apologize for our delayed public reply and any anxiety this incident has caused. It has taken us some time to understand what has happened and how best to ensure we protect our users.

We take our obligations to you very seriously. While we deployed great effort to remove any data that could be used to identify individual users, it appears that in some cases such identification remained possible, albeit for what may be a very small number of WOT users.

Of course, if the data allows the identification of even a small number of WOT users, we consider that unacceptable, and will be taking immediate measures to address this matter urgently as part of a full security assessment and review.

Additionally, after Mozilla notified us that they were removing the WOT add-on from their store (pending responses to a set of questions / proposed changes they sent to us), we voluntarily removed the WOT add-on from all other platforms, including the Chrome store, in order to resolve this matter properly and comprehensively.

To that end, we are taking the following steps:

• Reviewing our privacy policy to determine which changes need to be made in order to enhance and ensure that our users privacy rights are properly addressed.
• For the user browsing data used to enable WOT’s website reputation service, we intend to provide users the ability to opt-out from having such data saved in our database or shared. This opt-out will be available from the settings menu, as we want to provide each user with a clear choice at all times.
• For people who agree to let us use their browsing data in order to support WOT, we will implement a complete overhaul of our data ‘cleaning’ process, to optimize our data anonymization and aggregation objectives to minimize any risk of exposure for our users.

We will spend the coming weeks making the changes to WOT which will ensure we are back on the right track. You, our community of users are the real power behind WOT and we will continue serving you as such.

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by Remah

I think that it is worth quoting their message. If they complete what they say then WOT will be even better for me.

I agree. Their third point clinches it for me.

Being picky you could call them out for using "minimize any risk of exposure" but no one is able to claim "eliminate 100%".

[Sope]

The content of the announcement is certainly commendable, however the issue of trust already being broken will be much harder to address. The fact remains that, not only were they selling on users data, but they failed to anonymise it, or cleanse it of personal information and are only now acting having been exposed publically. May well have been a genuine mistake but it was still negligent. Given the nature of their business, it somehow makes it worse.

[Burn-IT]

I don't believe that it WAS accidental.
It is like the vast majority of these things ----
We'll do it as long as we can get away with it and only then do something about it and "apologise" saying we didn't know.

[Geert]

We'll do it as long as we can get away with it and only then do something about it and "apologise" saying we didn't know.

Exactly. I have the impression that's how most of the businesses are run these days.
Translated to this specific case: We're call ourselves "Web of Trust" as long as we can get away with it.

[deya]

I'd prefer it if, when available, users got the option to opt in rather than opt out. It would also be good if the option to opt out was not hidden away in Advanced Settings but displayed clearly in the settings, like Warning notifications etc. See what happens.

I can't help thinking that users such ourselves, being wise to it, will have no problem opting out but others who may not be aware of any of this will still be opted in.

Opted out should be the default setting with a notification asking if you would like to share your data. A clear notification.

[Anupam]

That's how it should be. But unfortunately, and sadly, the norm nowadays is that such options are opt-out usually. So, only the people who know about it, or, the ones who venture into the settings would change it. The rest of the general users won't be aware of it, and therefore, will continue as it is.

Sad state of affairs.

[Ratzo]

So is there a better alternative ?

[Sope]

Originally Posted by Ratzo

So is there a better alternative ?

I've read enough about WoT lately to conclude that I don't need or want it, or for that matter, anything along similar lines.

Possible alternatives may be BitDefender Traffic Light (depending on your standpoint, privacy may also be an issue with this one) or Webutation (looks abandoned though)

Personally, I'm happy relying on uBlock Origin with a few extra 3rd party filter lists added.