WOT Plugin for Firefox
When I went to look for a Firefox extension this evening, I noticed that Mozilla had put the WOT Firefox extension in its top “We recommend” slot.
The idea is that people rate web sites they visit based on how trustworthy they are — is the site running malicious Javascripts, for example — and then the extension warns you when you are about to visit a site that has a rating that indicates it might be malicious.
So, in effect, is a blacklist of sorts for websites. Which brings up all of the issues that accompany blacklists for e-mail. I was trying to decide just how useful this was when I ran across this exchange in the extension reviews on the Mozilla site,
WOT-NOT-YET
Not yet rated by computermancan on March 21, 2008Great idea BUT VERY DANGEROUS WHEN ONE PERSON CAN CHANGE RATING SO MUCH AND POSSIBLY FOR ulterior motives.
I thought this was the best thing since sliced bread until one day when I went to my own site http://www.church-software-store.com to have it come up black and with all sorts of yellow circles.
Then I knew something was wrong. The concept is great but regardless of what they say about weight it doesn’t stand up. I found that some Google sites also popped up warnings. I went to the forum to complain and found people saying that they down-rated my site for reasons such as DESIGN, the fact I had affiliate links and banners, and other such totally common links on the web. The criteria should be more like SiteAdvisor, sites that are actually linked to harmful sites or where background popups are found or spontaneous downloads occur or where spam mail is received after visiting the site. I hope they use better criteria and come back with a more trustworthy product not so influenced by individual whims.Developer Reply: Re: WOT-NOT-YET
Reply by Against Intuition on March 21, 2008Charles, the reason other users don’t find your websites trustworthy is probably because you attacked and insulted them on our forum, which usually isn’t a good way to gain trust or make friends. We’ve already explained this to you in the email where we told you this kind of behavior isn’t acceptable in our community.
What comes to your concerns about “individual whims” and “ulterior motives”, WOT is an open community where no single user has the power to determine ratings. If you don’t agree with a website’s rating, you can always rate it yourself. I can assure you we have no intention of censoring anyone’s opinion even if you disagree with them.
Tags: Firefox, MyWOT.Com, Web of Trust
Comments 6
Jul 3rd, 2008
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:31 am
Dear Brian,
Thank you for your questions. I hope I can clarify a few things for you so you will feel comfortable using WOT.
WOT combines evidence collected from multiple trusted sources, like whitelists and phishing and spam blacklists, with the user ratings when computing website reputations. The output is filtered through the same algorithm (read more here, http://www.mywot.com/en/blog/differing-opinions) to produce a rating which tells you the site’s reputation.
Obviously, we don’t know why someone decided to give a certain rating for a website, and we don’t influence people on how to rate. However, our system estimates the reliability of each user automatically based on their rating behavior. If a user bases their ratings on how pretty the site is or what’s the phase of the moon, her ratings won’t be trusted. Each new user starts at the bottom and must earn the system’s trust by rating rationally.
I hope that helped to explain WOT. If you have some specific questions and would like to hear from WOT users, please feel free to post on our forum, http://www.mywot.com/en/forum
Thank you,
Deborah
Web of Trust, http://www.mywot.com
August 5th, 2008 at 10:37 am
“WOT” might have some value in determining the suitability of a website for children (and the jury is out on that one!) But as a guide for the worthiness of a website, it is pretentious and useless nonsense and has absolutely no credibility whatsoever in being able to assess, with any degree of accuracy, a website’s integrity. There are countless websites of long standing — highly reputable organisations advertising their services on the internet who have been labelled/displayed with a question mark. This happens in the organic search results and the sponsored listings on GOOGLE. Firefox are deceiving the public with this fake consumer information and everyone should be made aware of this useless tool which is provided under the guise of altruism but whose motives are probably more commercially inclined.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Note that Firefox has nothing to do with WOT and the WOT extension.
Clearly the usefulness of something like WOT is going to depend to a large extent on how many people actually use it. The more people using it and rating web sites, the more accurate its results are going to be.
Personally, I thought Deborah had very good answers to the questions I posed in the initial post.
August 5th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Well Firefox advertise that they have this add-on facility available for the users of their browser. Therefore they are responsibe for introducing this nonsense to their patrons/customers. The numbers of people providing their personal preferences for a particular website may possibly alert other surfers to inappropriate or offensive content of a particular website. Don’t, however, imagine that WOT isn’t open to massive abuse by those with a vested interest in destroying the reputation of a respectable business competitor.
And there will be an ongoing problem for numerous legitimate websites from what ‘appears’ to be a certificate of unworthiness handed out by WOT. Unfortunately the genius of the internet is constantly being erroded and corrupted by foolish ideas.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
The Mozilla Foundation doesn’t vet items for Firefox, any more than Microsoft is responsible for adware or viruses that run on Windows or Apple is responsible for crappy OSX software. (They do vet iPhone software and the crappy stuff in the app store is really disappointing, as an aside.)
The WOT plugin reminds me of Amazon.com ratings–gameable and best of value with large sources of data. (Would you trust Amazon ratings of obscure books?) Until it gets a lot more popular I don’t think I would trust it with, say, animalrights.net if the AR movement got ahold of it and beat the site up for a while.
August 6th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I think Mark’s right on the money. You can’t really prevent any of these systems from being gamed — even Google has had issue with people gaming the pagerank system, etc.
I really haven’t look at WOT that closely, but typically systems like this have a way for someone to confirm that they are the person behind the product and allow that person to respond. I don’t know if WOT has a way for website owners to do that, but that would be an obvious way to at least give people wrongly tagged as having untrustworthy websites to respond.
But really, I doubt that many people are using it so its recommendations probably aren’t that important in the big scheme of things. And, of course, if a very large number of people do start using it, then its results will be much better.