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In this post I will recap answers to some of the questions that keep coming up every now and then, and which many of you have probably thought about at some point. All of these answers have already appeared in our blog or in the help section.

Reliability

The first question that pops into people's mind when they hear about WOT is that if it's anonymous, how reliable can the reputations be? Well, WOT is not your father's rating system, where each anonymous user has an equal say in reputations. Instead, it's more like a meritocracy where pseudonymous users earn trust by showing rational behaviour when testifying. If you are a new user or your behaviour is erratic, the system won't trust you.

So how can you tell if the reputation you see on the add-on is reliable? You look at the confidence indicator. The more vertical bars you see in the testimony window, the more the reputation can be trusted. If you see none, our system has very low confidence in the correctness of the reputation.

Abuse

But isn't this susceptible to manipulation, what happens if I recruit all my friends to give bad testimonies to a website? The concepts above make it a lot more difficult to manipulate reputations. Of course, our system doesn't solely rely on them to protect itself from attacks, it is also able to automatically detect and stop manipulation attempts.

However, despite these measures, we don't believe any system will ever be perfect at stopping all kinds of manipulation. If our system doesn't have any reliable data for a website, it is still possible for a single user to have a large influence on the reputation. If this happens, the confidence in the reputation will be low, so you will be able to notice this.

If you come across a website whose reputation you believe is wrong, the first thing to do is testify. It's just a couple of clicks away. If you believe the reputation is being manipulated, we encourage you to report it using our feedback form or via email. If you are a website owner, please remember that we don't set the reputations, we merely provide our users the means for sharing their opinions. However, all abuse reports will be investigated.

Annoyances

I receive a warning when I visit a website I know to be trustworthy, what can I do about it? Warnings are shown only if the website has a bad reputation in one or more categories and the confidence in the reputation is high enough. However, if you disagree with the warning, you can make it go away simply by testifying. Just open the testimony window and see which reputations are wrong.

If you find some of the add-on features to be annoying, you can easily disable them in WOT preferences. Either right click the indicator icon and select "Preferences..." or use the Tools / WOT menu. For example, if you feel the warnings are too invasive, you can configure how they are shown or disable them entirely for any category. Other features can be configured the same way.

A quick tip many users haven't noticed: if at some point you would like the add-on to stop bothering you right now, just right click a indicator icon and deselect the "Enabled" option to immediately disable the entire add-on.

Privacy

How about my privacy, do you track where I browse? No, we don't track you. We have perhaps the strictest privacy policy in the industry, and we follow it to the letter. We don't receive or store any information that our system absolutely doesn't need for computing reputations or preventing abuse.

For example, the add-on never sends the URLs you visit to our servers, it only sends us the hostname for the site. That is all we need for looking up the reputation. The hostname is strongly encrypted in transit to make sure nobody can eavesdrop on you. Even your request hits our server logs encrypted. Furthermore, the add-on caches any reputations it receives. This means that reputations are requested only when you first enter a website, not on every subsequent visit to a different page.

And most importantly, we don't permanently store any information on where you visit or what you search. Everything is deleted after a month, except for your testimonies, of course. In comparison, Google recently announced that it will start "anonymizing" logs after 18-24 months, and made no promises on ever deleting anything.

Anything else?

If we missed a question you have always wanted answered, don't hesitate to drop us a note. You may also want to check out the earlier posts to our blog for further information.