WOT in Firefox

[Madmogone]

HI all, not sure if this is the correct place for this question or whether it will be allowed, I found out yesterday that the ( WEB OF TRUST) add on in firefox has been found to be selling on all details of users to third party companies and I was wondering what other users are using to check their websites ?. I look forward to any replies,Cheers all.

[deepakdeshp]

There are many references about WOT stealing data on the net, best is to remove it.

Thanks for getting this to the attention of users.

[Cosmo.]

It was from the beginning doubtful, if WOT is worth to use at all. It relied on user's data, very easy to spoof. Better: use your common sense.

[inkoalawetrust]

Thanks for getting this to the attention of users.

its literally all over the place

[xdicey]

I've never heard of this.

Can someone please elaborate on what exactly WOT is, what it does or suppose to do and how to remove it from FF, please?

[Cosmo.]

Read here.

Do you have WOT installed at all? It is not present by default. Open the add-on Manager in Firefox, there you can remove it easily.

[xdicey]

. thanks.

[absque fenestris]

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/IceCat

Good side to check Firefox add-ons. Good selection of extensions. No junk!

Any Mac users: I have downloaded & installed IceCat on OSX 10.7 - it is fast & works like a charm...

[mtj]

I removed it when I heard that. The only extensions I still use are HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and uBlock Origin

[Joss]

Sad story this WOT affair.
I also uninstalled it. Had been using it for years and still feel a bit naked without it.

[Cosmo.]

You were naked with it (but you didn't feel so).

[Linuxfarmer]

Using 'Self destructing cookies' and 'Ublock Origin' as replace since months. WOT was good at the beginning, but sooner become a censorship tool where groups of interest hail sites down for personal and political correctness reasons. Especially in today fake news war, a tool like WOT bring this war onto your computer.
Enjoy a free web as long this is possible

[millpond]

I have found WOT to be useful, but it will obviously have alot of false positives, especially on sites with hacking or politically debatable subjects.

I always assume ALL 'free' sites will try to sell metadata. Unless a guy is running a server in his bedroom, hosting sites for reasonably popular pages cost a couple thousand per year.

Best to use a VPN and evven then keep all sensitive information off your main machines. If you require things like personal banking, or have material you really dont want the world to see, put that data on a second machine that is ONLY turned on when needed. Or otherwise inaccessible, such as a VM.

WOT comes in handy when looking for innocuous information such as recipes, and health info - which often are booger traps. WOT will generally give a warning f other users ran into problems with them.

Just make sure you are able to bypass it if venturing into the realms of the DarkWeb and <violates forum rules>...

[Xmetalfanx]

I had my own site (free domains) get red flagged a few times because ONE other DOMAIN (say blahblah.webhost.com) was doing something illegal so EVERYTHING.webhost.com gets red flagged. Even though that is just me I had a few other hiccups YEARS ago with WOT and I just got sick of it.

I rather just use common sense online and perhaps noscript if i was still a firefox user ... .or any addon by Gorhill ... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock like Ublock Origins (He's the original developer)

[MontleyHour]

FIrefox and Chrome on their own have good enough built in protection that dangerous sites (outside of maybe Phishing sites) will be picked up and warned to you beforehand thereby eliminating the need for WOT. Shame that it all went down that way though.

[HubertCumberdale]

I used to use WOT too, but uninstalled it when I learnt it was selling users' web browsing data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Servi ... acy_issues

It's meant to have cleaned up its act, but I won't be reinstalling it. Once bitten, twice shy.

If you install the uBlock Origin add-on in Firefox, Chrome, Chromium or Opera, then that will block ads (including malicious ones), trackers and malware (make sure you select "Disable pre-fetching" in the uBlock Origin settings).

[sindyciaray]

Enjoy the web as long as it can be, Well I still use are HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and uBlock Origin

[HubertCumberdale]

Enjoy the web as long as it can be, Well I still use are HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and uBlock Origin

Yeah, I use the same (and other extensions like Self-Destructing Cookies) in Firefox for general web browsing, but those extensions play havoc with any website you need to log into or interact with in any way. So I also use Chromium in which I only have uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere installed (and even then it can be a bit of a pain getting sites to work properly).

Very rarely I just deactivate uBlock Origin completely, because I simply can't work out which requests (often hidden) need to be allowed or blocked to get a webpage to display properly.
Afterwards I delete all the HTML cookies, HTML5/DOM cookies, Cache, Site Preferences, etc using BleachBit. (Yeah I know some people advise against using BleachBit on Linux, but as far as browser stuff is concerned I'm fine with it).

As for enjoying the web as long as possible, well you're probably spot on there.