Thread: Phishing filter
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Forrest View Post
I'm not really fond of them either. No filter can solve the problem, and it gives people a false sense of security. Education is a much better tool.
It also means that you send your entire browsing history to someone like Google (if you use them as the source of info for what are potential phishing sites). Colour me cautious, but I am extremely wary of doing that given how bad Google's etc. track records are on privacy and data retention. Personally, I would say that this is the real reason why PayPal want you to use a browser that has phishing filters built-in (no doubt, they aim to be the source of their own filter list at some point, which you will then have to use if you want to keep using PayPal) and the reason why Mozilla offers Google as the default source (more revenue from Google for them).

It is either that or downloading a list of potential phishing sites (and keeping doing so to make sure it is up-to-date).

Personally, neither option is at all attractive, each is very prone to giving false negatives and neither will beat being cautious and actually thinking about who you are giving your credit card etc info to.

Last edited by JKT; 2008-04-19 at 08:02 AM.. Reason: Corrected false positives to false negatives.