Web of Trust Sells Your Browsing History, Delete It Now
One of the best privacy and security extensions , Web of Trust, one of the best privacy and security extensions , collects and sells tons of data about your browsing habits and does not properly anonymize it, according to a report from German TV channel NDR , Web of Trust. If you have it installed, it is best to uninstall it now.
Web of Trust is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that uses crowdsourcing to rate sites based on trustworthiness and child safety. It turns out that it also collects a bunch of data about your browsing habits and then sells it to various third-party companies. This is not unusual in itself, but it turns out that Web of Trust didn’t anonymize this data very well, which means it’s easy to identify who you are. The Web of Trust has collected a wealth of data, including postal addresses, travel plans, possible illnesses (basically anything you were looking for), and more. The original NDR focused only on a small sample of about 50 users, but the problem is so large that Mozilla responded by removing the add-on from its store, and WoT, in turn, removed the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
The WoT said in a statement that they are not trying hard to fix the problem, claiming they are taking the following steps:
- By reviewing our privacy policy to determine what changes need to be made to improve and ensure that our users’ privacy rights are properly respected.
- For user browsing data used to enable the WOT website reputation service, we intend to provide users with the option to opt out of storing or sharing such data in our database. This opt-out will be available in the settings menu, as we want to give each user a choice at any time.
- For individuals who agree to allow us to use their browsing data to support WOT, we will undertake a complete overhaul of our data cleansing process to optimize our data anonymization and aggregation goals to minimize any risk of impact on our users.
This is all a bit confusing, so we recommend that you simply uninstall the extension if you have it installed. While it looks like they are working on bringing the extension back to stores, it looks like it will have a dramatically different privacy policy, so it’s probably best not to reinstall it even after making changes.
The Web of Trust Browser Extension Can’t Be Trusted | PC Mag