QUICK HIT: The Web of Trust Crumbles

If you have the Web of Trust (WoT) extension installed within your browser, consider removing it entirely.

An investigative report by journalists at the Hamburg-based German television broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), revealed that Web of Trust Services (WoT) had been harvesting the web browsing histories of its user through its browser add-on and then selling them to third parties.

WoT claimed it anonymized the data that it sold but the journalists were apparently able to identify more than 50 users from the sample data it acquired from an intermediary.

The browser extension has been removed from the add-on repositories of both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

If true, this could certainly signal the end of WoT, an extension which way back in 2013 had already received more than 100 million downloads.

Pete Prestipino

Digital marketing executive with proven experience in all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), performance-based advertising, consumer-generated/social media, email marketing, lead generation, Web design, usability, and analytics. - 20-year Internet marketing veteran, currently serving as the Digital Marketing Campaign Manager at Antenna Group (formerly Chicago Digital). - Former Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine, and a regular speaker on Web technology digital marketing strategy - Author of several books on digital marketing Including Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success; Affiliate 360: The Fundamentals of Performance Marketing; Domains 360: The Fundamentals of Buying & Selling Domain Names, and SEO 360: The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.