WOT (Web of Trust) accused of stealing private data

[trolly]

According to a German TV news show WOT sends private data to data aggregators without really anonymizing them.
As consequence the surfer can be identified.
Among these data are:
Date, time, location, URLs and a user id.

The reporters were able to identify several people including people of public interest.

http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/ ... tz100.html

Update: How it was done:
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/wot-addon-wi ... ausspaeht/

[makaiguy]

Oh, the irony ...

[Virtual_ManPL]

Yea... collecting non-personal non-identifiable information like IP, seems logical and legit

But whatever, mostly of these things were already written in their TOS, so in the end it's your fault for using this botnet.

https://www.mywot.com/en/privacy/privacy_policy
Non-Personal Information:

The information we collect is aggregated, non-personal non-identifiable information which may be made available or gathered via the users’ use of the WOT Utilities ("Non-Personal Information"). We are not aware of the identity of the user from which the Non-Personal Information is collected. We may disclose or share this information with third parties as specified below and solely if applicable. We collect the following Non-Personal Information from you when you install or use the Product or use the WOT Platform:

Your Internet Protocol Address;
Your geographic location (e.g., France, Canada, etc.);
The type of device, operating system and browsers you use;
Date and time stamp;
Browsing usage, including visited web pages, clickstream data or web address accessed;
Browser identifier and user ID;

[trolly]

In the added link above it is shown that the data includes email addresses and other very private information.

[toolong]

In the added link above it is shown that the data includes email addresses and other very private information.

I would pass this around to some friends but none of us reads German. Is there a link to this article in English?

[trolly]

I found this translation:

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/01/browsing-history-sold/

An excerpt from the second link:
Every URL I visited appears in the data including the session id.

You know what you can do with a session id.

[Virtual_ManPL]

Some follow up on Bugzilla - Bug 1314332 - Web of TrusT (WOT) Addon is malicious according to news reports,
with nice analysis included.

[toolong]

I found this translation:

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/01/browsing-history-sold/

An excerpt from the second link:
Every URL I visited appears in the data including the session id.

You know what you can do with a session id.

Thank you for the link. That was most helpful.

[MirceaKitsune]

Good thing I disabled WoT, mostly due to performance reasons. The bad news is, I only did so earlier today, after using it for over two years. I don't really see what it could have to do with tracking, but things like this happening in general is sadly unsurprising.

[kukla]

Any good alternatives for Mac (10.11) Firefox 45 ESR?

[RobertJ]

Any good alternatives for Mac (10.11) Firefox 45 ESR?

WOT was really never a "good" thing. It relied on "opinions" from users rather than actual vetted information.

.

[Reflective]

I think it's worth mentioning here that anyone running Windows 10 is giving away volumes of data for free to Microsoft who is also selling it on to third parties such as advertisers: https://senk9.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/ ... vate-data/

[trolly]

The problem is/was that individual users could be identified from the sold data.

[chrisroald]

From a win10 laptop mobile bb dongle uploaded 2gb's 'data' in a day! Could this have been the o/s or an addon of ff?