Avast WebRep protects you against Phishing , and it gives you a rating , if the site is safe , risky , or unsafe.
But the rating , is only given by user opinions right ?
Or does Avast actually scan the pages and contribute to the ratings the people see ( green , yellow , red ) ?
For example ( unlikely ) , 1000 people have a personal vendetta against a particular website , and they all rate it ‘’ unsafe ‘’ while the website is perfectly safe , how does Avast handle that ?
It was user-based…there was no need for labs input really, as the Network and Web Shields covered Avast!'s input already…maybe if it was a stand-alone, but as a bundle only, it would have been pretty redundant, unnecessarily so.
Now it has a Phishing filter…I’m not sure if the filter is run by Avast! or if they are using someone else’s list like Phishtank or Googles. So it is not totally user-based now. But it is not “scanning ahead of you” or anything like that.
As far as rating abuse goes…if you look, all it asks you is “do you like this site and how much?” Very ambiguous, it almost takes rating abuse out of the picture, since all it does is take an opinion poll of Avast!'s users. And everyone is entitled to their opinion regardless of intelligence. The tags (porn, warez, etc.) could be abused, but the colored slider? Its an opinion score, no more or less. Everyone is entitled to their opinion regardless of intelligence.
If the filter is from Google or Phishtank , does Google or Phishtank then also recieve the domains i visit and my search engine results ?
If Avast gets it , ok , but Google does not really have a privacy friendly reputation.
facepalm@self…how did I not know that this was going to be another privacy question?..
Those were just 2 examples. There are more phishing databases than those 2. I have not seen anything about what list (or lists, there might be more than one) Avast! uses, or just their own.
The requests are checked against avast! servers only, they are not passed through any 3rd party filter (i.e. nobody else is getting those requests).
Understood , thanks.