Mozilla acquires review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox

Enlarge / Fakespot adds letter grading, adjusted review scores, and other context ("New Seller Alert") to product pages across the web. (credit: Amazon/Fakespot)

Fakespot, a useful service that explains how products you've never heard of could have 12,000 reviews with a 4.6-star average, has been acquired by Firefox maker Mozilla, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox.

"We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the Internet," writes Saoud Khalifah, founder of Fakespot, on the company's site. "In Mozilla, we have found a partner that shares a similar mission as to what the future of the internet should look like, where the convergence of trust, privacy, and security play an imperative part of our digital experiences."

Mozilla acquired the article-saving tool Pocket (formerly Read It Later) in February 2017 but had already integrated its extension directly into Firefox. Pocket was a key piece of what Mozilla calls its Context Graph, a kind of human-powered web discovery and understanding system. It's easy to see Fakespot as part of that.

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