WOT: Web of Trust
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| Developer(s) | WOT Services |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2007 |
| Website | www |
MyWOT/WOT (Web of Trust) is a browser add-on and web site. WOT is an online reputation and Internet safety service, providing crowdsourced reviews and other data about whether websites respect user privacy, are secure, and other indicators of trust.
In November 2016, a German state media investigation found that WOT had secretly collected personal user details and sold or licensed this information to unidentified third-party businesses and entities for data monetization purposes. This activity breached the privacy rules and guidelines set by several browsers. As a result, the browser add-on was involuntarily removed from Mozilla Firefox's add-on store, and voluntarily removed from other browsers' add-on/extension stores. WOT was eventually reinstated.
WOT Services was founded in 2006 by Sami Tolvanen and Timo Ala-Kleemola, who wrote the WOT software as post-graduates at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland. They launched the service officially in 2007, with Esa Suurio as CEO. Suurio was replaced in November 2009, and both founders left the company in 2014.
In 2009, MySQL founder Michael Widenius invested in WOT and became a member of the board of directors. WOT Services is no longer a portfolio company of Widenius's venture capital firm, OpenOcean.vc. In February 2016, WOT Services changed its name to TOW Software.
WOT Services has partnerships with Mail.ru, Facebook, hpHosts, LegitScript, Panda Security, Phishtank, GlobalSign and TRUSTe.
By November 2013, WOT had over 100 million downloads.
WOT has made money by collecting browsing history data from its users and selling that usage data; it said that it anonymized the data before selling it.
On November 1, 2016, German public broadcasting station NDR reported the results of an investigation by in-house journalists, showing that WOT collected, recorded, analyzed and sold user-related data to third parties. The data obtained was traceable to WOT and could be assigned to specific individuals, despite WOT's claim that user data was anonymized. The NDR investigative journalism report was based on freely available sample data, and revealed that sensitive private information of more than 50 users could be retrieved. The information included websites visited, account names and email addresses, potentially revealing user illnesses, sexual preferences and drug consumption. The journalists also reconstructed a media company's confidential revenue data, and details about an ongoing police investigation.
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