• Facebook Partners Up With Web Of Trust To Warn Users About Malicious Links

    Alexia Tsotsis

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Thursday, May 12th, 2011


    Because Facebook is clearly concerned with user privacy, it’s partnered up with crowdsourced reputation management service Web Of Trust today in order give its population of almost 700 million users protection from links deemed “risky” by the Web Of Trust community.

    As of today, if a user clicks on a link with a poor Web of Trust reputation rating, they will see the above warning telling them that the link has been classified as abusive. And then they can either circumvent the link, learn more about the Web of Trust rating or continue browsing.

    “Facebook users are passing around links that can disrupt the system, and Facebook is very aware that users are experiencing the effect of opening spammy links, stuff like ‘You just won a prize.’ We are the first of a number of security companies that Facebook is partnering with because people are much more aware of [and concerned about] their privacy these days,” Web Of Trust marketing manager Deborah Salmi told me.

    Through the multi browser Web of Trust extension, the Web of Trust community has now classified five million sites as untrustworthy, fraudulent, responsible for phishing or other unsavory behavior. Users who want to see the Web of Trust reputation rating off of Facebook, on Google search results, Twitter links and shortened URLs can download the Web of Trust extension here.

    Website: mywot.com
    Launch Date: July 2006
    Funding: $1.3M

    Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered browser add-on that helps web users find reliable websites. WOT uses an intuitive traffic-light rating system to help web users stay safe when they search, surf and shop online. Website ratings are crowd-sourced from a fast growing worldwide community of WOT users who have rated the reputation of tens of millions of websites based on their experiences in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. Community ratings are augmented with...

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