Whatever happened to the Web of Trust thing? We could have a curated one so that an extension can indicate:
- whether the domain is substantially similar to a trusted one
- recent data breaches
- whether the site has been known to sell data
Those could be indicated by different, intuitive colors:
- red - high likelihood of phishing/malware
- yellow - recent data breach; user intervention required, but the service itself isn't fraudulent
- green - reasonable safe
- green padlock - trusted
It would be awesome to get all major browser vendors on board to ship it by default, and make sure that data is never sent upstream (download a database).
I loved MyWot! I was one of the earlier users around ~2007 until 2009 or so. It helped teach intuition on sketchy, dangerous, and bloated web pages. The community was small and plenty of sites were unrated, though a surprising number still had ratings (and I was fairly active myself).
To answer your question, privacy addons started selling our data. I remember Adblock Plus added "Acceptable Ads" around 2012. MyWot redesigned in 2013. Times were changing. Surely enough in 2016 they were found selling sensitive user data. It's not like this was a surprise, since it's the reason I left years ago.
These days, I'd rather reduce my browser dependency. I hope the community finds a way to filter the 1% of useful data on the internet into like a .txt file, or something that doesn't make me solve puzzles to grep.
- whether the domain is substantially similar to a trusted one - recent data breaches - whether the site has been known to sell data
Those could be indicated by different, intuitive colors:
- red - high likelihood of phishing/malware - yellow - recent data breach; user intervention required, but the service itself isn't fraudulent - green - reasonable safe - green padlock - trusted
It would be awesome to get all major browser vendors on board to ship it by default, and make sure that data is never sent upstream (download a database).