There are many things wrong with his approach, not the least of which is that it is inaccurate. To exacerbate the problem, WOT does not make a clear, easy to recognize distinction between the site which they rate as dangerous and the site that the visitor is on. Yes, WOT does make a distinction but it is not clearly stated - it's a small byline - "fine print" you could say. We all know people seldom bother reading fine print. It's confusing and sometimes alarming to people who are browsing the Web and who get warnings that say "this site is dangerous" on sites that are safe. If someone visiting a site for the first time, it's quite probably that they're not going to stick around long enough to read the fine print. Most people who are not familiar with a site, or who are relatively inexperienced on the Web, are going to see that warning and that's all they're going to see. The true nature of the warning, in small text, will most likely never be seen - but the big black and red warning will. There's a good chance that those people are going to leave that site and probably never come back.

This reminds us of the firewall approach to things. Everything's dangerous unless you say that it's not. WOT's accuracy seems to have declined over time, its newest version, while detecting more, is, in our view, less accurate. It also shows far too many false positives. Many of these would be eliminated if WOT didn't rate some of most well-known advertising networks as dangerous - untrustworthy, unsafe for children, distributors of malware(?), etc. (See Casalemedia.com, Doubleclick.Net, Linkconnector.com ). While it may be a quintessential truth that no one likes advertisements, that doesn't mean that a company engaging in the business of advertising is dangerous, evil, or out to ruin your computer. In fact, we're not aware of a single advertising network that offers downloads for consumers - or that knowingly advertises trojans, worms or viruses. (Ask.com: We want to point out here that Ask.com, while not an advertising network, does distribute what some call spyware, adware, and hijackers. Yet WOT rates Ask.com, "Excellent".)

We've been a friend of WOT since last fall. We've promoted their product and we've believed in WOT. But, if WOT doesn't fix its program, this over-kill approach to security is going to become an issue. More and more users are noticing the problems with WOT's aggressive approach to security and we're starting to get emails from users complaining about it. We agree with the readers who've written. They have every right to complain - we've recommended and endorsed WOT - something we don't take or responsibility lightly; many readers rely on our opinions and judgments. When we recommend something, it means something. It means we've tested it thoroughly. It means we've compared it to other programs. It means when we recommend something, we trust what we are recommending. If something we recommend like WOT starts showing signs of change for the worse, we contact the developer. If we don't see any improvement, we pull our endorsement and recommendation of the product. In WOT's case, we've written them several times about this issue with overkill and negative ratings for some well-known advertising networks.

He are some examples. The first is from Dictionary.com and the second from the NY Times' Web site. And, while WOT clearly shows that NY Times site is being blocked as dangerous (they are using another network to gather user input via a  survey), many people will simply leave the site and assume that WOT has protected them from a "dangerous" site. WOT's crying "Wolf!" too many times, and if they don't fix it, they're going to start losing users, others are going to start writing about this problem, and eventually sites which are now recommending WOT, especially those who depend on ad revenue are simply going to stop recommending WOT - for many reasons: accuracy, reliability, accountability - and because WOT, by blocking many ads and ad networks as dangerous, is going to start hurting many sites' income.

Figure 1 - Dictionary.com