Press

Web of Trust (WOT), the world’s leading community-powered safe surfing tool, continues its strong growth. It reached the milestone of 30 million downloads on Monday the 9th of January. WOT aims to multiply its user base in 2012, and confirm its position that crowd sourcing is an effective safety mechanism on the web.

“Web of Trust is a unique service combining information from trusted sources with a community of tens of millions of web users, who actively rate websites. The Internet is an ecosystem where everything evolves quickly, and only a community that’s large enough can monitor it effectively. I believe companies will reach this same conclusion, and include WOT’s crowdsourced solution in their IT portfolio”, says Vesa Perälä, CEO of WOT.

The idea of WOT was born in 2006 by two university students from Tampere University of Technology, in Finland. It reached its first million downloads in August 2008, 10 million in March 2010, and 20 million in April 2011. The users are around the world, most of them in the US, Russia, and Germany. In 2011, Facebook and Russia’s largest free email provider Mail.ru started using WOT to protect their users.

WOT helps web users to find safe websites by showing traffic light icons next to links. The traffic light icons show how trustworthy other users believe the site to be. Based on real user ratings, WOT protects from threats that automated technical solutions miss, such as bad customer experiences, phishing, and content that’s unsuitable for children.

“WOT’s growth is based on user recommendations – the word about an excellent product spreads fast on the web. Users understand the diversity of online threats and want to actively take part in making the web safer. We thank our community for helping us reach this milestone”, Mr. Perälä concludes.

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. The leading community-based safe surfing tool uses intuitive traffic lights to help web users stay safe when they search, surf and shop online. Website ratings are powered by a fast growing worldwide community that has rated the reputation of over 35 million websites based on their experiences in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. The add-on works with Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari and is a free download from www.mywot.com.