Despite assurances that progress is being made to secure transactions online, consumers still have overwhelming concerns about the safety of sharing personal information when making an online purchase or conducting banking business.

The Identity Theft Resource Center's (ITRC) recent research* shows that 87% of consumers who have done online shopping or banking in the past 30 days are worried about the safety of their credit card numbers and other personal information. Online shoppers are concerned that merchants will lose their personal and financial information in a data breach. This chart illustrate's ITRC findings that over a third of the study participants are also concerned about phishing, stolen passwords and usernames and spam email.

Bad news for online retailers

The results of a data breach can be devastating for an online merchant. 73% of respondents said they would stop making purchases at that website if a breach occured. And 68% said they would tell their friends about the breach at the offending website. With the popularity of social networking, this word-of-mouth bad news spreads like wildfire, and it takes time and a great deal of effort to repair the damage to the site's reputation.

Good news for online retailers

These findings demonstrate how important it is for online merchants and banks to take steps to protect their customers' privacy. Communicating their trustworthiness and safety to consumers is also essential.

70% of online consumers look for a trust seal before conducting business with a website. Displaying the WOT Trust Seal on the site makes it easy for potential customers to verifiy that the site is trusted, safe and secure. Website reputation ratings are powered by WOT's global community of millions of users who have rated the reputation of 30 million websites.

Learn how you can get a WOT Trust Seal for your site.

Participate in the WOT poll and answer the question, "What actions fo you take to reduce the chances of your personal and financial information from being stolen online?"

*The findings are part of the ITRC’s 2010 national survey to monitor trends in “Consumer Concerns about Internet Transactions.” 

When looking for a Florida vacation home to rent this winter, how about making your searches smarter and safer?  It's possible with the WOT Safe Search engine.

The WOT Safe Search engine uses Surf Canyon's real-time search personalization technology to interpret your search and find relevant information in the results; even digging through pages buried deeply in the results. Put another way, Surf Canyon figures out what you want and then goes past the first page of the results and fetches it for you. And because WOT is directly integrated into the results, you see only those sites that have excellent and good reputations from the WOT community.

Add the WOT Safe Search engine to your Firefox search engine drop down menu for safe and smart searches every time.

And don't forget to send us a postcard from Florida!

Software security firm McAfee recently published their fourth ”Most Dangerous Celebrity in Cyberspace” list. This year the dubious top honor went to actress Cameron Diaz. To put the topic into human perspective we checked what the WOT reputation rating community has to say.

We did some Google searching, typed in the name “Cameron Diaz” and found out that only one of the first hundred search results was rated poorly. We typed in “screensaver” and noted that almost half of the results were yellow or red. The same applied more or less to Julia, Jessica, Gisele, Brad, Adriana, Jennifer, Nicole, Tom, Heidi, Penelope and Anna from the McAfee list, all of whom we here at WOT HQ find really beautiful and talented at their work.

Searching for “Cameron Diaz screensavers” does result in some poorly rated search results but which should we blame:

Cameron or the screensavers?

When you search, browse or shop online, remember that cybercriminals are very clever at determining what people are looking for and designing their scam, malware or virus to meet that need. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” does not totally apply to cyberspace as you may actually find some pretty cool stuff for free here, such as screensavers, wallpapers and other downloads. However, be cautious - You don´t always have to learn the hard way. WOT users benefit from others’ knowledge and mistakes.

Use WOT for Safe Searching

Our community of 13 million users have rated 30 million sites for trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety, plus we receive additional information from trusted blacklists and lists of dangerous URLs. So when you are searching for your favorite celebrity, “dangerous” or not, check the WOT reputation first.

WOT works with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. Downloaded the free WOT add-on at http://www.mywot.com

See McAfee’s ”Most Dangerous Celebrity in Cyberspace” list.

PC Pro magazine, the UK's biggest selling computing monthly, recommends the Web of Trust safe browsing tool as an additional safety feature for the Google Chrome browser in the article Web of Trust makes Chrome even safer.

Contributing editor, Davey Winder, praises WOT's "wisdom of the crowds" approach saying, "I also appreciate its community ratings aspect, which in terms of trust feels right to me – it balances out any dependency upon a security vendor database."

PC Pro's article was the icing on the cake of a good Chrome day for WOT. The clever folks on the Google Chrome team have added a helpful list of featured extensions so users can more easily find what they are looking for. WOT is listed predominately in the Search tools section. We think this is a good organizational advancement to the ever-growing list of Chrome extensions.

Thanks, Chrome team and thank you, Davey Winder, for recommending WOT to your PC Pro readers.

WOT is pleased to announce a partnership with Paysite Cash, a division of Nordpay, a leader in the management of financial transactions within the Scandinavian countries for the past five years. Paysite Cash processes online purchases.

"Paysite Cash has obtained the WOT Trust Seal for its excellent ratings (visible on the homepage of Paysite Cash). The WOT Trust Seal is a sign of trust we are proud to display. It confirms the high level of security and privacy of our solutions and services," said Etienne Barrier of the Paysite Cash Team.