According to a report from the German television channel NDR, Web of Trust, one of the top privacy and security extensions out there, collects and sells a bunch of data about your browsing habits and doesn’t anonymize it properly. If you have it installed, it’s best to uninstall it right now.
Web of Trust is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that uses crowdsourcing to rate sites based on trustworthiness and child safety. It turns out that it also collects a bunch of data about your browsing habits, then sells it off to various third party companies. This alone isn’t terribly abnormal, but it turns out that Web of Trust did not anonymize that data very well, which means it’s easy to identify who are you.
Web of Trust collected a lot of data, including mailing addresses, travel plans, possible illnesses (basically anything you searched for), and more. The initial NDR report only focused on a small data sample of around 50 users, but the problem’s big enough that Mozilla responed by removing the add-on from their store, and WoT in turn removed the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
In a statement from WoT, they don’t really do much to shore up the issues, claiming that they’re taking these steps:
The whole thing’s a bit of a mess, which is why we’re recommending you just remove the extension altogether if you have it installed. While it sounds like they’re working to get the extension back in stores, it also looks like it’ll come with a dramatically different privacy policy, so it’s probably best to shy away from reinstalling it even after the changes are made.
Web of Trust is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that uses crowdsourcing to rate sites based on trustworthiness and child safety. It turns out that it also collects a bunch of data about your browsing habits, then sells it off to various third party companies. This alone isn’t terribly abnormal, but it turns out that Web of Trust did not anonymize that data very well, which means it’s easy to identify who are you.
Web of Trust collected a lot of data, including mailing addresses, travel plans, possible illnesses (basically anything you searched for), and more. The initial NDR report only focused on a small data sample of around 50 users, but the problem’s big enough that Mozilla responed by removing the add-on from their store, and WoT in turn removed the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
In a statement from WoT, they don’t really do much to shore up the issues, claiming that they’re taking these steps:
- Reviewing our privacy policy to determine which changes need to be made in order to enhance and ensure that our users privacy rights are properly addressed.
- For the user browsing data used to enable WOT’s website reputation service, we intend to provide users the ability to opt-out from having such data saved in our database or shared. This opt-out will be available from the settings menu, as we want to provide each user with a clear choice at all times.
- For people who agree to let us use their browsing data in order to support WOT, we will implement a complete overhaul of our data ‘cleaning’ process, to optimize our data anonymization and aggregation objectives to minimize any risk of exposure for our users.
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