Simple webs of trust: a distributed approach to “safe” browsing
I was poking around this morning on a school district website, when I noticed a couple of links (on the “parents” page) to resources around online safety for kids. On a related page, there were a bunch of links to resources for the kids, and immediately this idea came to me.
What if a person could tell their browser, “yeah, I trust this website to give my kid links to pages he or she can safely visit”? What if you could also tell your browser, “I trust this page to tell me about other pages my kid can trust, too”? This quickly develops into a web-of-trust model, in which individual pages don’t vouch for themselves, but for each other. Sites that are intended to be a part of this network could embed a relationship attribute in some links, indicating that the target page is a trusted introducer of other pages, or that the target page is not actually safe for kids under a certain age. All other links would be assumed to indicate that the target page is safe for all viewers, but not necessarily trusted to introduce other safe sites. Then, the site would become the hub of a web of trust in which a person with restricted access (or who simply didn’t want to accidentally wind up looking at images that didn’t fit his or her community norms) could safely browse. The key challenges would be in handling either all the data-storage required to localize a current list, or all the traffic involved in checking and updating it.
I think this has the potential to replace centralized safe-lists (and blacklists) for a significant portion of the safe-browsing market.
January 8th, 2008 at 12:07
Gavin,
It was interesting to read about your idea regarding safe browsing. We have implemented WOT, Web of Trust, that comes quite close to what you just described.
WOT – Web of Trust – is a rapidly growing community that lets Internet users exchange their knowledge about websites and the services they offer. Is the site trustworthy? How reliable is the vendor? Is the site safe to use? Is the content suitable for children? WOT’s reputation database is based on two sources: our users and trusted sources. WOT has information on over 16 million websites.
Membership and the software is free, and registration is optional. Please test WOT and tell what you think: http://www.MyWOT.com.
Best regards,
Esa Suurio
January 8th, 2008 at 12:32
@Esa: Thanks for the note! I saw in my logs that people were coming from your del.icio.us account, but I had no idea you had implemented free web-of-trust software for safe browsing. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like a great concept. The key difference between the software you offer and the approach I described in my post above is that, while the WOT software you offer depends on a centralized repository of data, a plugin that implemented the distributed web-of-trust I described above would depend only on data from websites selected by an administrative user on the machine in question.