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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just wrote a rather long review on the firefox add-ons website, and it tired me out, but I will point out one thing on the “reliability” of ratings. I decided to submit a review of a site that scammed me and many others (no flags whatsoever). After I marked it as bad, I immediately got a pop-up warning and it turned red. I am a new user… haven’t done ANYTHING with this before.
In this case, I think it is good because people are getting the warning which I know well to be valid… but it also means that anyone could sign up and change that much. Despite what they say about users needing to earn the system’s trust, and that one person can’t change ratings drastically, I was able to make it go from safe to dangerous… and mine was the only comment.
I am bothered by the number of people who seem to think that a flag from WOT is gospel, because then you really can manipulate it to your own ends (at least for less popular sites that naturally wouldn’t have as many ratings).
Hello Brian,
It has been a while since I followed the conversation, but Becky’s letter prompted me to write again.
Becky, what you experienced is the correct thing for the system to do, but you have mis-interpreted it. If you’re a new user, you won’t be able to set the rating for a previously unknown site by yourself. We’ll need more ratings before computing a reputation. However, if you rate a site red on your own computer, then the warning will show up for you. It’s a way of customizing WOT to suit your surfing style.
I’m glad you discovered and reported a dangerous site. Perhaps you would consider alerting regular users in the WOT forum and asking them to take a look at it too? Or you can “request a comment” from the site’s scorecard where you added the comment. If you have any questions about what I wrote or don’t understand anything, please ask on the forum and you’ll get a more detailed answer.
Brian, good news! WOT has now exceeded 3 million downloads and we have over 21 million sites rated. More and more people are using WOT in a layered approach to security. As Becky pointed out, WOT isn’t “gospel” on the reputation of a site, but it is an excellent warning system that could slow you down before you click on a risky site.
Safe surfing,
Deborah
Web of Trust
Ah, my mistake. Well, that point is moot, then. I will certainly follow up on that site I flagged.
I’m sure you have read or will soon read my rating on the mozilla page for this plugin. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’m going to hang onto WOT. What most upset me was the reports of people down-rating (and even admitting to it) for superfluous reasons. And in the review Brian cited, a website was really affected by it; it just seems so unfair.
However, though I read several such reviews, I realized that I really don’t know if that occurs often or if I just heard of the few instances it occurred. It might actually be quite rare… so I’m going to look into that, and I’ll make sure to keep in mind that not every happy user will post on the forums, but those with problems are almost certain to.
Ignorance/bad standards of some users aside, I realize how helpful user input can be… if taken with a grain of salt. As I said before, the thought that people take the flags as gospel bothers me a lot, because some people just won’t rate responsibly… but that is certainly not a WOT issue; it happens with all sorts of things. For example, my mother bought a flameweeder last spring. She wasn’t going to by it because the rating wasn’t great, but I told her to read the reviews… she found several that had marked the product low for ridiculous reasons (like the flameweeder not instantly incinerating weeds and reducing them to ash in seconds…)
Er, went off topic a little… sorry, I’m very tired ^^; But the point is, that as long as people are well aware that some have bad rating practices, this should be a good application. Reducing the amount that such bad ratings happen would make it a great application, but that takes time and you are already taking steps in that direction, it seems.
There is one last thing, though; I haven’t run into many red-flagged sites since I added this (it was actually earlier today… wow.) so I’m not sure if this is already a feature. If there is a site that has been marked dangerous by a trusted party, such as a blacklist of sites that have malware or whatnot, is that indicated on the score card? I think it would be very helpful if the more dangerous threats that were identified by professionals were marked that way
(by more dangerous, I mean something that compromises security of your private information, for example, as opposed to spam which is incredibly annoying but not dangerous). That way, if users who take ratings/flags with a grain of salt will know that the site DEFINITELY has a problem.
It would also be really useful- sorry, this is just something that popped into me head- if the type of threat was clearly marked; if it is a virus, you don’t want to go on that site. But if it is untrustworthyness from a vendor, you could still use the site as reference for pricing, to get product info and reviews, etc. even if you don’t want to buy from it.
I talk a lot when I’m tired… :O
You have valid points and good questions, Becky. Thanks for asking.
The WOT scorecard provides you with the details of a rating. For an example, look at this scorecard for screensavers.com, http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/screensavers.com. You will notice several things –
• The ratings are in the red for all four rating components.
• The confidence indicator (the graphic of the little people) is almost filled in indicating how reliable the reputation is. In this case, very reliable because many people have rated it.
• The site has been put into several categories – spam; malicious content, viruses; spyware, adware; and other.
• The sources, including users and trusted sources such as DNS-BH, hpHosts, and Spamcop, are shown in the comments section.
To add comments and categories to the scorecard, you have to be a registered user. But anyone with the add-on can rate a site themselves without adding any explanation, and everyone can see the scorecard.
Hope this helps clarify a little more. You have such good comments and questions that I think you would enjoy participating on our forum. Welcome!
Safe surfing,
Deborah
Web of Trust
Wow, MyWot people like Sami and Deborah are such liars I cant believe it. How do they sleep at night?
The problem isn’t that users post false information on Mywot. It’s that Mywot encourages them to bash innocent companies via their mass rating tool. They beleive the more bad ratings the more people will signup to post rebuttals.
Their “trusted sources” are only sites that collaborate with them and their fraud. For example, if you protest their false comments, and they know they are false, they will have you added as a phishing site in http://www.hosts-file.net knowing it isnt true. Then they will point to it as “evidence” of their unlawful and false posts.
The good thing is that they rate so many people bad their ratings aren’t even credible. But they should all be in jail for their misconduct.
What a bunch of uneducated morons.
See this: http://host-file.net/mywot.htm