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Safe Surfing Tool Web of Trust Sued over Community Warnings
Ten Internet companies based in Florida, US, have filed a lawsuit against WOT Services, the provider of safe surfing tool Web of Trust. The companies are requesting WOT to remove ratings and comments related to them. WOT is accused of defamation, violating rights, conspiracy and manipulating algorithms. WOT believes the case is baseless and has suggested dismissing the case in the court of justice in Florida.
The companies bringing up the case are Career Network, Inc., Three Stars Media, Inc., Three Stars, Inc. d/b/a Threestars of Central Florida, Inc., Internetcompany, Inc. d/b/a Internet-Company of Central Florida, Inc., Medialogic, Inc., Power Applications, Inc., MonkeyJar, Inc., and Buzzgrub, Inc. The person behind all the companies is Mr. Ayman El-Difrawin, also known as Alec Difrawi, Michael Difrawi, Alec Defrawy, Michael Jensen, David Mellon, Alan Madison, David Katz, Alec Simon, Alexander Simon.
If the case goes to court, WOT’s advocacy will base on the article CDA 230 (Communications Decency Act), legislated in 1996 for similar cases. The article protects Internet service providers dismissing them from liabilities related to content created by third parties.
“These are important things that we’re dealing with”, states Vesa Perälä, the CEO of WOT. “The Communications Decency Act was created to protect the freedom of speech; cultural, religious and political diversity, and trade on the web. The Internet has become one of the central battlefields of the liberty of speech and there are a lot of disagreements about what can and cannot be said or done online. Now and in the future we will rely on freedom of speech, transparency and objectivity when offering our users a channel to express their view freely, thus making the web safer for all.”
With WOT, millions of web users from all around the world rate websites according to their experiences, also exposing rogue websites. WOT users have pinned down more than five millions untrustworthy websites.
“Our users have rated more than 31 million websites. It is understandable that we encounter unhappy site owners whose websites have poor reputations. We know quite well this man in question and his reputation. We are not the first company he has brought to court”, says Vesa Perälä.
The WOT community consists of millions of web users that can detect scam sites effectively. WOT reputation ratings are updated every 30 minutes spreading the word and thus shortening the lifecycle of scam sites significantly. Thus those owning scam website have to invest more money for new domains, sites and services.
“WOT brings transparency to the web and makes it more difficult for scam sites to operate. Usually the motivation behind these law cases is fear of losing income. However, it’s better that scammers lose money instead of our users being scammed”, Vesa Perälä discloses.
About Web of Trust
Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered surfing tool that boosts trust on the Internet, by using authentic user experiences to help web users find reliable websites. By means of a free WOT add-on tool installed in the browser, Internet users can discern the quality of websites that they are about to access in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy protection and suitability for children. With traffic-light style icons, WOT shows the website’s reputation based on user evaluations and information from trustworthy sources. WOT works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. The service has over 17 million users around the world who have rated more than 31 million websites.
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