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Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#21

Post by FuNe »

moppl wrote: post #17
moppl wrote: post #15

Here is the blog entry of the Journalist Mike Kuketz, explaining in detail how he uncovered the fraud, unfortunately only in German. This includes samples of the questionable GET and POST Requests, as well as a link to a commit to the WOT sources on GitHub, which introduced the necessary changes ... https://www.kuketz-blog.de/wot-addon-wie-ein-browser-addon-s... The commit referenced in the blog: https://github.com/m…

And by the way, he also suggests in his blog post that Ghostery and Adblock Plus might as well sell browser histories as WOT does. There might be even more.

Reminds me of the old saying. "When the service is free the product is you."

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#22

Post by LinuxFreedom »

All the other addons are completely trustable, of course.

It also really helps that Firefox never deletes cookies by default and never tells you about this. We 'respect' your privacy, yes, we do! Really! Look, you will have only one google cookie when you start a very new firefox.

We really respect your privacy, yes! We will reiterate that until you believe it, but never change our privacy destroying default settings, because we 'respect' you!

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#23

Post by blub »

FuNe wrote: post #21
moppl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And by the way, he also suggests in his blog post that Ghostery and Adblock Plus might as well sell browser histories as WOT does. There might be even more.

Reminds me of the old saying. "When the service is free the product is you."

Lateley there's a trend to dismiss the above saying (i.e. if it's free you are the product) in a casual manner.

Reality isn't influenced by such dismissals or wishful thinking however. If a company's financial interests aren't aligned with the general interests of its customers, then it will trample over the interests of its customers. Google, Facebook, any company that's selling advertising are not only not your friends, but they're screwing you over.

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#24

Post by Ladnaks »

mkesper wrote: post #2

Did not find any english versions of this news yet, so here a translated heise site: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Here are some english articles: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/11/01/browsing-history-sold/ http://www.dw.com/en/german-report-points-to-online-privacy-... http://blog.a9t9.com/2016/11/wot-browser-extension-collects-...

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#25

Post by Ladnaks »

0xmohit wrote: post #13

Such innovation .. pure evil. What's the takeaway? Not to install any browser add-on? On a serious note, I guess that it might be safer to to run a browser in a Docker container and use one instance to browser only site. The question is that how feasible it would be?

Think about their business model before installing.

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#26

Post by blub »

raverbashing wrote: post #18
bimmer44 wrote: post #5

Web of Trust is a browser extension that claims 140 million installs. The marketing language on the home page [1] is all about how the extension will help users decide which websites to trust. Their privacy statement [2] includes a section that describes "Browsing usage, including visited web pages, clickstream data or web address accessed;" as one of the categories of "non-personal information" that they may disclos…

Do you know what would be a great way to prevent this? Every data send by an extension should be user viewable. Here's the json file (or maybe something better) that we are posting, press Agree to send it

No, the only thing that will work is to pummel guilty companies into the ground with fines.

But you can bet GooBookSoft will lobby against that like their lives depended on abusing customer data. And they do depend on it.

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#27

Post by nitrogen »

hannob wrote: post #12
therealmarv wrote: post #8

I wanted to say: And Google did not removed it. But actually it is also gone in Google extension store. Google also seriously needs to think about security in their Chrome extension store. I've seen more than once ads injected by extensions by the auto update (no real security there). Maybe I've been also tracked in the past. Google needs to actively monitor all extensions for ad injection and tracking code (where ar…

> Google needs to actively monitor all extensions for ad injection and tracking code (where are their AI experts on that?) All the AI experts in the world won't be able to solve the halting problem. What you're asking for is impossible.

All the AI experts in the world won't be able to solve the problem of people thinking a problem is equivalent to the halting problem.

You don't need perfect performance, you only need to stay ahead of most of the attempts. Fighting fraud is similar -- it's not possible to stop 100%, but you can get close, and try to make it easy to minimize/undo the damage done by the false negatives.

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#29

Post by r721 »

sumlogp wrote: post #16

What's interesting is how the story completely failed to make the news in the English-speaking net for several days. The story broke on Tuesday (CET), outside Germany it was only picked up by ghacks until now...

Ghacks is shadowbanned on HN for some reason. I vouched for this particular story, but it didn't get traction :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12850214

Re: Mozilla stops distribution of WOT addon

#30

Post by r721 »

consto wrote: post #19

So basically I should uninstall it, correct? Does anyone know of anything to replace it?

I think you can use their bookmarklet, but personally I don't see any benefits as somewhat similar Google Safe Browsing service is internally used by all major browsers.
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