Browser add-on Web of Trust (WoT) has been harvesting an selling user's surfing data without anonymising it. After this incident was uncovered, WoT was dropped from Firefox and Google.
Advertising
Last week I've repored within my German blog about a #surfgate (see Datenskandal: 'bist Du gläsern?' Millionen Daten von deutschen Surfern offen gelegt). Journalists from German TV broadcasting revealed that Web of Trust Services (WoT) collected surfe data from Million users and selled it to data brokers.
In an ivestigative report, journalists reveled, that a data sample received from data brokers contains millions of user data obtained from surfing history. The data hasn't been anonymised, so the journalists was able to identifiy journalists, politicans, managers and other people and gain access to their most privacy secrecies.
The data was harvested and sold by Web of Trust (WoT), a service and a rather popular browser plugin. After uncovering data harvesting, WoT was dropped by Firefox and Google. Some details may be obtained from this The Register article and this neowin.net article.
