mywot.com - To build a “web of trust”
Posted on April 19, 2008
Filed Under Information Security Awareness |
While searching for the measures taken to increase the web safety, my colleagues Archana and Vidya (Blog Masters of The 8falcons blog) referred me about a cool tool named WOT , which stands for “My web of trust”.
It is a wonderful concept that allows the users to rate the trustworthiness of a website as they browse. The cumulative ratings my multiple users is used to build the trustworthiness of each site. The user rates the site using a small plugin that is available as a free download from www.mywot.com ,that easily installs into Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Once the plugin is installed, it rests on the browser bar as shown below and when you start accessing sites, the plugin shows the trustworthiness of each site.
When a user browses a site, they can click on the “mywot” plugin and see the current rating of a site and also do their own rating. The rating is based on four criterion, such as;
- Trust worthiness: A rating is poor if it shows scams like lottery or identity theft risks, credit card fraud, phishing, spyware, adware, malware or computer viruses. The site may obtain a rating of “unsatisfactory” if it contains annoying advertisements, excessive pop-ups, or content that makes the browser crash.
- Vendor reliability: Rates whether the site is safe for buying and selling or for business transactions in general. A “poor” rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.
- Privacy: Tells whether the site owner can be trusted, if it’s safe to supply an email address, and download files. A “poor” rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.
- Child safety issues: Indicates whether the site contains age-inappropriate material of a sexual, hateful, or violent nature, or content that encourages dangerous or illegal activities.
Apart from the users’ rating, WOT builds it’s “trust index” from hundreds of trusted sources such as phishing site listings and spam blacklists.
I really liked the concept of mywot and I have installed it on my browser. I hope you to do the same. To know more, please go to www.mywot.com
HTH,
Asok Ramachandran
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