Selling personal information and browsing history.
Complaint
Rob Deangelo
Country: United States
Esa Suurio at My Web Of Trust, http://www.mywot.com/ ; his site gathers your personal information and sells it to hackers. They then sell your browsing histories to marketing companies and spammers. The best part is that his site acts like a safe haven for you to feel comfortable signing up for an account. You think you're protecting yourself but in order to sign up, you must give them your name and email address. But that's the same information that he accuses other people of "taking and selling"...
Esa Suurio and MyWOT needs to be stopped!
Esa Suurio and MyWOT needs to be stopped!
Comments
ANSWER: It'll be much easier than trying to sue the unreachable blackmailing domain holders to just beat them at their VERY OWN game:
EASY IDEA #1:
Go log into your own MyWOT account, and ban and blatently defame very reputable sites like PAYPAL, MICROSOFT, YAHOO, GOOGLE, FORD, AOL, TIME/WARNER, IMDB, EBAY, AMAZON.COM with statments like: Blatenly scams people, is a phishing site, charges your cc without refunding, etc etc., A well known member of a Fraudulent associated set of sites just discovered! Make it believable!!
Since their information isn't kept with an ounce of moral fiber, why not help them out a bit. Once corporations start getting listed in google as scam sites, you'll see some real action against these morons!!! Only post one or two really good ones per day to avoid being tracked on their greedy little radars. They are LOOKING FOR GOOD COMMENTS TO DELETE THEM, NOT NEGATIVES, THAT'S WHAT THEY LIVE FOR!!
Easy idea #2: We can't stop the users they already have aquired from leaching off legitamate companies with their blackmailed comments as you tried to earn trust, BUT YOU CAN STOP THEM FROM GETTING MORE!!
Register a very similiar domain like: www.mvWoT.com , www.my-wot.com www.imyWot.com www.mryWot.com or what have you, get the idea... just pick one.
Spend the $7.00 for any domain close to thiers. Spend the 5 extra bucks to hide who you are (like they do), Then post their logo and put a huge defamatory remark on the entire page that explains: MyWOT has been found to blatenly violate their privacy policy. If your company has had deragatory facts posted on this site, MyWOT is liable for all damages. If you feel you have been manipulated into giving them your information, contact the BBB and RipOff Report.com for further details.
Again, put their own copyright, put their own WOT logo on the site and tell all the newcomers WOT is closed due to fraudulent activities. If you have the utility installed, it is advise you remove it as your computer may become infected. MyWOT is no longer considered safe.
NOW, lets get this domain registered in google. Use a free submit service like: www.dreamsubmit.com Onward fellow trustworthy domain businesses!! Onward and godspeed!!!
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Even though the approach you suggested had me LMFAO, it puts you in harms way. They could retaliate against your for deliberate confusion of brand. I suggest you stay visible to me and the people who are taking actions. Robin Basham, enterprisegrc.com, facebook/enterprisegrc
Digg EnterpriseGRC /robinbasham is our corporate identity, which can be me or five other people. My personal is grcguru. We are a small, woman owned business in San Jose, CA, but this where we pack a lot of whollop. Strength in numbers. Power in Knowledge. Join us in getting something important done.
This is how the SCAM WORKS:
What happens is someone can login to the WOT account, and rate a site as phishy or unsecure for absolutely no reason at all. When this happens, anytime a customer goes to your website, a large popup will occur stating this is an unsafe site, and you should not proceed. This is ridiculous since WOT does not have any means of checking to see if this information is infact accurate. They just go off of that single rating inputted by a random person. Now, the only way to have this popup removed is to either buy thier "Web of Trust Seal" which costs $451/year, or have tons of people sign up for an account in their system, which in turn will bring the company more revenue as well.
Here is there 'game', you complain, then the stop answering your emails, then you complain on their forum and they 'block your' name and password so your account is virtually locked. They don't respond to any questions, there is NO SUPPORT and the support there is doesn't assist but gives you wrong answers and the run-around. So like God, they block you off your account so you cannot even answer malicious statements left by other WOT users that is inaccurate. I hope this company is closed down and will line up to sign a lawsuit against them...
No phone number, no response from company they are NOT a WEB OF TRUST but a Website UNTrustworthy!!!!
I have never hated a company as badly as I hate this company. Non-Responsive, Ludicrous Ratings, Playing with people's livelihood and They don't even respond to a problem When They Are Wrong! I truly hate this company.
Allen
Graduate school rated enterprisegrc.com content aside, the company known as Web of Trust, WOT, has determine its 113 pages of GRC articles and reference to CSA, ISA, NIST, ISSF, HISP, CobiT, IIA, ISO, as unsafe for children. That’s not why I am writing. This was a calculated experiment based on a hunch that began when I published an article about CRAP™, counterfeit reader access performance, Value of a Conversation. As I had suspected when I suggested to Dan Swanson’s Governance group that we test the WOT rating system, it is a scam but the financial depth exceeded my imagination.
The first step in the WOT pyramid is to invite sites to build their reputation. The next step is to get the site owner to invite a few people to comment and to rate a few other sites. The product installs as a Google Chrome and FOX browser add-on. The third action is WOT reviewers write an arbitrary negative comment. (This doesn’t negate their posts on actual bad sites, but that’s not at issue). When the user defends himself, there is a follow on stage of multi person humiliation. The retaliatory comments are likely based in formula, because a search reveals that the same comments are used on thousands of registered sites. The answers to complaints are also likely computer generated.
WOT extends the argument of free speech and consensus of peers, but they only count the elite team of reviewers. i.e. the ones they want, and unlike such tools as Digg, this extremely small group of “reviewers” has power to avert 750 Million Facebook and 100,000,000 (+more) Google daily users and as many from Firefox away from a business. Think about this. One, two or at most three people can avert more than 3 Million people from seeing a business site. Viewers on Firefox, from Facebook or Google will be presented with a POPUP that the site is unsafe.
As you know, the enterprisegrc.com site only uses the joomla registration to slow and catch bots. We have a presentation only site because it is a hosted joomla 1.5 platform, notoriously not secure enough for PII. The entire 113 pages of content is open to general users and the only thing that registers on the site are spammers. We supply this information to Sorbes and track the relationship of counterfeit reader access performance to specific IP. We report the rank increases and decreases weekly based on the removing of spammers through a standard process to block.
Actual enterprisegrc users, such as Larry Brown, Mike Sim and Mitch Impey, attempted to legitimately use WOT but Mike’s ratings were blocked. Larry and Mitch did get to write an endorsement, but they’re not considered expert enough to vote. For a fee and by getting more people to sign up, WOT extends that the business user will eventually earn the right to display their seal. The recourse of legitimate business is to purchase badges and bring WOT more users, or “friends to post”.
Some interesting details. Google restricts WOT from providing a rating on sites that paid for Google advertising. Paid subscribers get preferential treatment. Facebook uses WOT and is therefore given a pass on the 2500 complaints for malware alone. In the US, it is not legal to suggest protection to those who pay. Cyber bullying is now a crime, but we needn’t care if paying for protection is happening in cyberspace. It was always just a crime. The members of WOT, and in particular Sami, CEO, engages in targeted retaliatory action. I don’t really care that much about my site. Scared independent business owners all over the world, people who are trying to stay off un-employment but can’t speak their “opinion”, that is something I really care about. Mathematically, we providing money to ten people at a harm rate of 3 million people a day! (see the collection of evidence in the form of links below,)
Here’s where we involve the SEC and FTC. This ten person Finish company is overvalued based in CRAP™, counterfeit reader access performance. The site shows it has a value of 1M to 4M+ based on readers, but as with many of the sites I’ve humanly evaluated, the user community suggested as using WOT is at a minimum 1000 times over reported.
Overstuffing, which is a known spam characteristic, in the Google index and the Yahoo and Bing index, mywot.com shows two million, eight hundred seventy thousand pages . This is permitted by Google and has completely bypassed the Panda 3 algorithm. Any other company with this attribute would have been shut down in the last 20 days. All of US and Europe have worked tirelessly to reduce spam in our traffic. In addition, it is clear that the review rate on sites would not support use of actual people . If reviews are not produced by “volunteers” we again come back to accountability. The reviews must be owned by the business, those ten people who own and work for WOT. Claiming to use volunteers, it is not humanly possible to perform valid assessment on all these sites. That means WOT is accountable to the slander that is published as their community posted information. Again, a European company is using poorly understood US Law to manipulate a world market. They are fast gaining power to sway upwards of three million users a day. ANTI-TRUST
At the least we must remove WOT from our authorization policy and restrict it in all browser configuration. The increase of BYOD and a phase of involving corporations in use of Facebook for advertising means that WOT has the power to influence a reported 750 million Facebook users in what is recommended or not recommended for viewing. Add a million using Google and a million using Firefox, DAILY.
So in conclusion, the ten persons who have developed and operate WOT Web of Trust are running a racket. Now let’s move to privacy.
I used two different email accounts to evaluate the enterprisegrc.com site. I am the CEO, and my husband and I certainly deserve two accounts. WOT, however, used my private browser characteristics and Facebook profile to inform me that I was one person acting as two. I was sent an email to inform me that I was a fraudulent user and blocked. They could only have established this by gathering information outside of my Facebook profile.
Let’s think about this. WOT knew that the two accounts came from one machine. I did not tell them. Now back to the fact that WOT is gathering private information on 63 thousand viewers a day.
Quite simply, this needs to be investigated on their turf by the laws of EU data privacy and listed for review by IIA, ISA, ISF, the FTC and SEC.
Right to Remove, Right to Be Forgotten: Taking advantage of US laws that are not keeping pace with identity management, WOT is not allowing users to remove or remediate their published reputation. They are bullies, and this collective influence to place a red ring against the sites that don’t pay into Google or WOT is netting them exponential millions. The data they collect and sell is worth a number that frankly, they didn’t teach when I went to school.
Daily Unique Visitors 62,603
Daily Ad Revenue $1,505USD
Alexa Rank 2,114
Google Page Rank 6 (PR is Genuine
Google Indexed Pages 2,870,000 Show
Yahoo Indexed Pages 80,400 Show
Google Backlinks 477 Show
Yahoo Backlinks 6 Show
Dmoz Listing Yes
Domain Name mywot.com
There are hundreds of complaints against WOT, but people have fought based on their individual business and personal damage. Let’s not leave small business owners so short sited. We have the collective vision to fix this. We need to view this as a societal problem. It is undue influence.
DNS Record Analysis
In summary, there are 14 records in domain name system (DNS) of mywot.com including 1 address (A) record, 4 name server (NS) records, 1 start of authority (SOA) record, 7 mail exchanger (MX) records, 1 text (TXT) record.
Host Type Target / IP TTL Other
mywot.com A 217.149.52.196 300
mywot.com NS d.ns.mywot.com 10800
mywot.com SOA 2560 mname: d.ns.mywot.com
rname: hostmaster.mywot.com
serial: 1331199673
refresh: 16384
retry: 2048
expire: 1048576
minimum-ttl: 2560
mywot.com MX aspmx.l.google.com 1800 pri: 1
mywot.com MX alt1.aspmx.l.google.com 1800 pri: 5
mywot.com MX alt2.aspmx.l.google.com 1800 pri: 5
Michael and Mitch, where you have access to ISA and ISSF, and with copy to Larry Clinton, I am asking that a watch be placed on the activities of Web of Trust and their financial relationship to Google and Facebook. We are looking at a pay for protection racket. They turn our own ignorance right back in our faces, using such things as a Wikipedia article to squash complaints with pat answers.
I found it was actually necessary to uninstall all the WOT code from my browser, to reboot and remove twice. There pages list IP addresses and code for millions of website, but this is tossed aside as “expert opinions”. I have temporarily changed our network carrier and reset our MAC address in hardware. This is not paranoia. As I’ve shown the group, when we add this type of tracking to our systems and then launch any link from any web based email client, we can be traced, and we are traced.
You know me, I have thousands of pages in screen capture and evidence, but this goes so far beyond my little web site of interesting facts. This will break trust for Google, Firefox and Facebook. Here in the Silicon Valley, our economy would literally topple from their destruction. I sincerely believe in the men and women who work for Google, Firefox and Facebook. I believe that given the right feedback, the board of directors and the investment community will put the right pressure to guide business to the right direction. So long as the benefit in this extortion scheme is undercut by the advice of SANS, IIA, ISSA, ISF and with policy changes made in ISP and Financial industry best practice, we can brush this nuisance aside. The product is of no value. We have such reputable companies as McAfee site advisor. As for WOT, no one will miss them, but a few hundred thousand struggling and sincere business startups will be forever grateful for their fresh and fair start
http://digg.com/newsbar/story/web_of_trust_ma ... ust_ratings#_=_
http://digg.com/newsbar/story/mywot_com_web_o ... rds_in_ohio#_=_
http://digg.com/newsbar/story/sami_tolvanen_a ... ainst_mywot#_=_
http://digg.com/newsbar/story/mywot_com_web_o ... 81481237582#_=_
http://www.facebook.com/Anti.W0T
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wot-safe-browsing-tool/review