Update: avoid this extension like the plague. It has been removed from the various stores for privacy reasons. It turns out they were selling the navigation data of their users.
A couple of years ago, I discovered the Web of Trust browser extension. This extension enables you to easily identify fraudulent websites.
Once installed, it displays a small circle next to each link you’ll find on the Internet. This circle will have one of the four following colors:
- Red: untrustworthy website
- Orange: suspicious website (be cautious)
- Green: trustworthy website
- Gray: unrated website
Here’s an example of a Facebook post:
The extension also shows a warning when you enter a website that has a bad rating:
Any user of the extension can rate websites he comes across, contributing to the database. It’s also possible to add a comment when you rate a website. All this can then be found on a dedicated page. For instance, for the Facebook post above, the page is visible here: https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/steam-cards.com.
This extension allowed me to dodge quite a lot of strange websites posted to Facebook, like those videos that were like automatically. Given the number of people that take the bait each time, I think this can help quite a lot of people.
Web of Trust is available on all major browsers and can be downloaded from the official website.
