Take the spyware quiz

How good are you are recognizing unsafe websites — sites that have unsafe downloads or sites download spyware and use exploits, sites that collect email addresses to spam? SiteAdvisor has a quiz to check your site-sniffing abilities. They say:

[...] it’s hard to judge a book by its cover. We’d argue that it’s even harder to judge the safety of a Web site by its looks. Think you can sniff out which sites are adware & spyware free? Take our spyware quiz and see.

SiteAdvisor is a browser plug-in that helps you decide if web sites are safe or unsafe. For details on how it works click here. You might have already heard about SiteAdvisor by now. It unofficially debuted in December. Ben Edelman, who is on the board of advisors, has an article here about SiteAdvisor and why it’s different from other programs like TRUSTe’s Web Privacy Seal, different from Verisign’s certification program and TrustWatch’s toolbar. 

I wholeheartedly endorse SiteAdvisor now — I think it’s an excellent program. I’ll admit to being a bit reluctant at first because I checked some sites that I know to be sources of malware, and those sites were given a green rating. At that time, SiteAdvisor did not have the ability to detect web pages with exploits; however, that functionality has since been added. You can download the SiteAdvisor toolbar for Internet Explorer or for Firefox and plug-ins for other browsers are in the works.

I took the quiz.  My score was just over 50% and I think I’m pretty good at picking out the baddies. Go take the quiz; you can post your score in the talkbacks.