- Mozilla has launched a paid subscription service called Mozilla Monitor Plus, which monitors and removes personal information from over 190 sites where brokers sell data.
- The service is priced at $8.99 per month and is an extension of the free dark web monitoring service Mozilla Monitor (previously Firefox Monitor).
- Basic Monitor members receive a free scan and one-time removal sweep, while Plus members get continual monthly data broker scans and removal attempts.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/YdY3R
God bless the Mozilla foundation
For reselling a service already being offered for decades?
How dare they try to bring this to a larger market at exactly the same price as that other company without increasing the price.
It’s… It’s unAmerican!
They really need a way to gain money independently from Google. Reselling an interesting looking service is better than only Google.
There are already plenty of companies that sell managed data removal like this, Mozilla claims to be doing it better and perhaps they are incrementally more trustworthy than the smaller no name ones
Discover does it for free, but they only do so on a handful of sites.
Decided to try it out, 489 request in progress vs the 10 from a year with Discovers free takedowns.
I think it was only 3 when I first signed up, so that’s an improvement. They probably hit the ones most likely to honor takedown requests, but yeah 190 sites is more than 10. $9 is more than $0 too though, so it’s a balance.
I wonder how many sites like this actually exist. Probably over a thousand would be my guess.
How can they know it’s your data without first collecting your data to compare it?
“Give us your personal information so we can ask others to delete your personal information” just doesn’t sound like a trustworthy offer.
I can also see the irony. But I can’t imagine another way to do it at any scale. Do you know of another option?
Something akin to haveibeenpwned.com password hash partial match? Can that even be done with this data?
Edit: You goofs know you can calculate the hash locally and submit it for review without actually exposing your password to them right? That’s how bitwarden does it’s check. https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/#cloudflareprivacyandkanonymity
Ah, but Mozilla isn’t even trying to do anything cool like that. They just use onereap and those fuckers look shady. Quotes from their privacy policy: https://onerep.com/privacy-policy#what-data-we-collect-and-how-we-do-that
We use your Personal Information for a number of purposes, which may include the following:
[snip]
- To display advertisements to you.
- To manage our Affiliate marketing program.
There will be times when we may need to disclose your Personal Information to third parties. We may disclose your Personal Information to:
[snip]
- Third-party service providers and partners who assist us in the provision of the Services and Website, for example, (a) those who support delivery of or provide certain features in connection with the Services and Website (e.g. Stripe, a payment services provider; Sendgrid, an email delivery service; HubSpot, a CRM platform, and Sentry, a crash reporting platform); (b) providers of analytics and measurement services (e.g. Google Analytics, ProfitWell etc.); © providers of technical infrastructure services (e.g. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS); (d) providers of customer support services (e.g. Zendesk); (e) those who facilitate conduct of surveys (e.g. Hotjar); (f) those who help to advertise, market or promote our Services and Website (e.g. Mautic, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, Reddit Ads, and Microsoft Ads);
The bastards
Unless you trust Mozilla. I’m unaware of another organization that is more trustworthy, despite the haters mad that CEOs make money.
services like this rely upon the data harvesters and brokers to honor removal requests. honest ones would. but there’s tons of them that aren’t legit, so it’s like using a straw to empty lake superior.
Even for the “honest” data collectors I’m sceptical any of these services really work. Privacy and data protection laws are weak in many places, and even the countries that have enacted better legislation in this regard often have fairly toothless enforcement. Data is the new oil and is far too valuable for companies to want to part with. There seems little real incentive for companies to truthfully cooperate with these schemes.
We need chain of custody data laws. If FB sells your data they’re responsible for keeping a chain of custody as to who they sold it to and requests for removal need to follow that chain down with regular audits and stiff fines for noncompliance.
If I’m reading this correctly, are they basically just reselling the Onerep service ($14.95/monthly or $99.96/annually) for $8.99/month?
They’re reselling it for $13.99/monthly or $107.88/annually.
So it’s cheaper if you buy it for just one month at a time, but more expensive for the annual subscription… And there are other alternatives besides.
And there are other alternatives besides.
If you have a Discover card they’ll do the monitoring/removal for free.
Discover only removes it from ten sites.
