Your browsing history may have been sold already

Hmmm... sounds familiar... where have I heard this before? Oh, right! Adblock Plus!

God I miss the 90s! The Internet was much better/simpler place then without all these protection racket BS "businesses"that have emerged lately ...

What I don't miss from the 90s is 56k modem speed ...

 

Yeah I've been using it for over 5 years and I'm a Platinum member over there.

 

Uninstalled WOT. sadly I used it for more than 6 years and now it goes rogue.

 

Uninstalled WOT as well.

 

Same here, All computers, All browsers.

 

Hey, I just went to check the reviews of WoT on the Mozilla Addons store and it looks like WoT has been pulled.

Edit: Chrome too!

 

I don't believe WOT is going to survive this incident. I'm about ready to cancel / delete my account with WOT.

 

Maybe a re-brand and re-launch is in their future?

 

They better hurry up, I'm getting old!

 

http://www.dw.com/en/german-report-points-to-online-privacy-violations-by-add-on-site/a-36250477

 

Yes it has... well, that was fast, just a couple of days after this started.
What a sad story all this is.

 

More interesting reading.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1314332#c6

 

Looks like the commit Sami Tolvanen referred to:

is dated April 20, 2015 and corresponds to WOT-Firefox version 20150420. A Chrome commit:

https://github.com/mywot/chrome/commit/2206b8f4eeb50fc59eee9613f17599a2851a9a3c

is dated April 21, 2015 and corresponds to WOT-Chrome version 2.6.0.

Edit: I see the firefox-xul commit was previously mentioned here: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/wot-addon-wie-ein-browser-addon-seine-nutzer-ausspaeht/

 

Well this sucks! I have been using WOT for years, but until things change (if possible) I'm removing it on ALL computers

 

If you are a adguard user then you can at least disable the WOT option in the gui.
the other setting I am thinking about disabling is the take part in development option.
WOT has also blocked sites for me. until I hear more on the subject I will stay clear of it.

 

@boredog

Regarding Adguard and Wot

https://forum.adguard.com/index.php...ng-wot-stops-them-from-selling-my-data.15708/
"Wow, thanks for sharing this article. I'd like to read WOT answer too.
Anyway, in case of Adguard's extension, no data is handed to WOT.
We pay for their websites reputation data with cash, not with users' data.
Requests are made to our own server - rating.adguard.com.".

Official Statement
https://blog.adguard.com/en/official-statement-on-web-of-trust-case/

 

I've never used WOT in the browser but I did check sites occasionally to see what users were saying about such and such a page. Some sites that are necessary for a web page to function would be labeled as spyware etc and I saw the same people saying the same things over and over.

You really should be checking extensions and add ons to see how they are interacting with your network. I'm sure there is a way to do so with FF but this, below, covers Chrome. In addition to this I expect to see the extension on Github though it doesn't mean that being on Github gives an extension a clean bill of health - WOT was at one time there - but NOT being on there does say something.

https://labs.detectify.com/2015/11/19/chrome-extensions-aka-total-absence-of-privacy/

 

When you do shady stuff, truth comes out eventually.

I am so much disappointed by it. What's wrong with them, did they listen to all these "sell-me-your-users-data" people hanging around all the time?

What's really bad is that they really did provide the best source of websites reputation data. I agree that it could be sometimes "too subjective", but anyway, it was the best we had. I'd still like to get an official comment on this from them (or at least an answer on my hecking email).

Also I'd like to say a word about those german journalists. They did a magnificent job of exposing this:

 

To date this is their statement.

https://www.mywot.com/en/forum/70476-user-update-from-wot

 

It's a shame really as I always thought it was a well coded extension, by that I mean it seemed light and didn't slow anything down. I remember when Ghostery was light and effective, sadly that went a bit downhill (bloaty) and there were concerns about privacy too.

 

How/where do you do this in Adguard?

 

Yeah, I read this. I hope this is not their final statement.

Settings -> Extensions.

 

I'm currently using the Firefox Adguard extension. Is this only available in the full version?

 

Isn't there a Virus Total add on/extension for Firefox?

 

Yes, that is VTzilla (and there is VTchromizer for Google Chrome, and VTexplorer for IE).
It's functionality is not the same as WOT, but quite different.