Today I decided to write a short review about my experience with a tool called Web Of Trust (WOT). People who install WOT get additional security relevant information about the websites they surf. How this works and why it is an additional risk is described in this article.

The Web Of Trust consists of two elements, the website of WOT (mywot.com) and the add-ons available for firefox and other browsers. The add-ons are what actually shall make surfing more secure. When searching for websites, by using Google or whatever your favorite search engine might be, the add-ons place icons near the links informing about their state of trust.

Each website's state of trust is calculated from community input provided on the WOT website. The website is a very large community of anonymous Internet users, rating and commenting all WOT-known websites.

When surfing the web with WOT installed, I found out there are many sites with - lets say inaccurate - rating. Please convince yourself: Do some searches at Google and inspect the results. You'll soon be able to find both inaccurate kinds of ratings, some false-positives and some false-negatives.

So, what does WOT mean to your personal security. To asses that, please first read the Wikipedia article about Risk Compensation. That's the theory of a rising risk just because of the presence of security. Regarding WOT this means, if a website is rated green (thus being secure), an Internet user will handle the provided website with less care. If the green symbol was a false-positive, the user is exposed a signigicantly higher risk than he would be without WOT.

Now think about the child-safety WOT pretends to bring to your children's computer. Many parents will activate WOT and let their child surf the Internet without attendance. Due to the many false-ratings of WOT, children solely protected by WOT are exposed to a much higher risk than childrend attended by their parents on the Internet.

But how can so many false-ratings happen in a democratic web community. The answer is simple: anonymity and complexity!

Think of the WOT community consisting of do-gooders, but also many people with certain self-interests. Both kinds of people define, how good or bad a site is rated, and both are by far not impartial. Each individual of them is very unreliable. Just the collective of lets say a hundred or more of them will - due to normalization - generate reliable results.

Not think of the huge Internet with endless many websites. The most sites on the Internet have zero or just a few WOT ratings. As each community member is potentially very unreliable, websites rated by just a view members are most likely rated simply wrong.

Finally, the only conclusion I could come to ist, WOT is a nice little try. But the only recommendation a serious webmaster can give to Internet surfers is: Don't trust the tools, but use your common sense and don't let children surf without attendance.