There’s a lot of data being thrown around today, through social networks, deal sites and mobile coupon collection services, local search and even restaurant recommendations.  Processing all of that is an easy task for machines, but what about people?  Today’s consumer is faced with a firehose of information, from blog reviews to personal suggestions being pushed through the guise of one’s social graph. It’s creating a new need for privacy services, and a new perspective on its regulation.  Determining who to trust in a world now reassessing what privacy really means, WOT has updated its Web of Trust service with a social media plug-in for Facebook and Twitter.

Currently in beta, WOT for Social Media offers the protection of validated reputations across Facebook, Twitter, and even URL shorteners like bit.ly and t.co.  What WOT offers through its social media plug-ins is a reduction in the risk of dangerous URLs being passed unwittingly.  You’ll see which sites are safe, potentially dangerous or hazerdous, based on crowd-sourced and third party verified feedback.  Certain actions can be taken from here, such as blocking access to a site, or overriding the security functions.

WOT’s had a few years to evolve along with the web, which has seemingly become an even more dangerous place, when it comes to the safety of personal data and the possibility of malware or misleading links to penetrate a socially driven system.  As WOT continues to grow, so too does its reputation validation process and database, compounding the information it can compare and leverage towards one recommendation or another.

WOT’s been pretty busy lately, working on its global expansion.  It’s also branching its partnership strategy, teaming up and providing pertinent information to several US search engines, data supplements for companies like GlobalSign, school systems, and even Russian email portals.  It’s because of WOT’s extensive and long-standing experience in the curation of a safe web that WOT’s able to provide so much value to such a wide range of companies.  A CEO switch in 2009 has also introduced more aggressive tactics in WOT’s marketing and partnership strategies.

The result is 18 million global users, taking on 31 unique domains, determining their trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, protection and child safety measures.  This unique data set is seeing a fresh attitude around its adoption, and application for several purposes.  It’s all part of continued foundation-building for WOT, which plans to announce a major social networking partner in the coming weeks.  As WOT’s data finds itself in higher demand, the company’s value will increase in tandem with consumer needs and interests.