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I suspect that the reason adult sites are being exploited to distribute spyware, viruses etc. and are malware's biggest vehicle is because of their moral questionability: people can easily complain about receiving spam but they don't feel likewise comfortable complaining about having visited pornographic websites. In a way, this makes that sites' category more palatable for the malware distributor because they know less people will report those sites.

The fact that 90% of school children have come across adult content online is also very worrying: an indication that the computers they work on are not as supervised or fine-tuned as they could be. You can find parental-control tools and add-ons for the most popular browsers but clearly they are no use if they are not turned on.

Perhaps WOT should consider adding an easy-to-use, password-protected feature that blocks red sites from the view, so that parents can easily implement safe surfing for their children.

I'm a WOT evangelist, and I'm at a loss to understand why you would shine attention on the WEAKEST element of the WOT featureset. If your "published studies" and other PR material were focused on "What does WOT do differently?" What does WOT do well? What does WOT do better (than any other 'solution')?" I wouldn't be voicing the criticism that I am, today.

C'mon, anyone who installs the browser addon and expects it to "protect children from online porn" is in for a serious disappointment! By design, the addon doesn't "examine every link, on every page surfed" to ascertain whether the linked domain is reputedly "safe". This every link -checking only occurs on selected search results pages, and in a few other contexts, like Yahoo! mail webpages.

The search results of Google image search, YouTube et al already have an effective warning/barrier "page may contain offensive content. Please register/login to view" safeguard. EFFECTIVE. Clicking the flagged linked does not display the "questionable" content. An interstitial "must login" page is displayed instead. In contrast, the WOT mechanism is INEFFECTIVE -- images embedded into a "porn" (or whatever) page will usually be retrieved, and displayed, well before the WOT addon has had time to "call home" to check the domain's rating and draw the "warning" page overlay.

Worse, amounting to absolute FAILURE, are the instances in which a child arrives at a domain "not yet rated" within the WOT database.

Other browser addons are available which *DO* check every link, on every page surfed. Some of these (alternatives to, competitors of, WOT) such as Finjan SecureBrowsing even pre-screen webpage content by downloading and examining it in a proxied sandbox.

I arrived here, using WOT and thankful for its existence, after exhaustively trialing various similar "security" broswer addons. No, I do not leave WOT enabled continually; no, it is certainly not the only "security" measure I utilize. TRUST. I use the WOT addon because I trust that your database content is less stale, or less tainted/biased, or otherwise more trustworthy than that of SiteAdvisor. Further (and perhaps ironically, in the context of this post) I use the WOT addon because I can TRUST that your addon is not "calling home" to report (and log!) every blasted pageview of my surfing sessions. Although I don't want "always on, every pageview" protection from WOT...

...and I can't guess whether your service can scale to accomodate "every link, every pageview" reporting, if you are going to tout "porn protection", the tool really needs to proxy and block BEFORE the (visual) content has been allowed to load. Whether you offer this as a paid (premium) or free feature, until a user has the ability to opt for "check every link, on every page" you really are undermining TRUST by claiming (and emphasizing, in this PR release announcing your 'latest study'!) the WOT tool offers adequate "childsafe" protection.