Firefox removes Web of Trust extension for selling privacy sensitive data to 3rd parties

Mozilla has removed the Firefox Extension Web of Trust (WOT) from addons.mozilla.org, the official download location of Firefox extensions. The extension was caught selling privacy sensitive data to third parties.WebWeb of Trust is an extension that warns users whether a website is safe or not. Recently the German television revealed that Web of Trust sells anonymized surfing data to third parties. But, the data could easily be traced back to the original user and could contain email addresses, usernames and other identifiable parts of URLs. The problem was found in the Firefox extension of Web of Trust, but the extension is also available for other browsers.

Numbers for Mozilla show that more than 870,000 Firefox users have the extension installed. Web of Trust claims on its own website that more than 140 million users have downloaded the software.

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Currently the extension is no longer available through addons.mozilla.org. Mozilla can also remotely block malicious Firefox extensions, but so far Web of Trust is not on the block list of Firefox.

Web of Trust doesn't mention anything about the issue on its own website.

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