1y ago

Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web

www.theverge.com

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.

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1y ago

Mozilla's new service tries to wipe your data off the web

www.theverge.com /2024/2/6/24062765/mozilla-monitor-plus-firefox-paid-subscription-privacy-data-broker-removal-requests

70 comments

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.
  
  They really need a way to gain money independently from Google. Reselling an interesting looking service is better than only Google.
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.); (c) 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.
  
  deleted by creator
- Likely you must provide Mozilla with basic identifying data like name and birth date. Which isn't all that radical since you're giving them quite a bit more by paying them.
- It's better when it's in their hands, because:
  It's Mozilla - one of the more trusty organizations out there.
  They don't get your information in some sneaky way from some source that was never supposed to be available to them.
  You know exactly how they make money from your data.
- It's ironic yeah, but if trust is the only way to implement something like this, then Mozilla is probably the one company I would trust considering they're a non-profit org.
- There isn't a better company to do this than mozzila. I mean there literally are but in practice this is a good thing
- The way I see it, if you're asking for data removal, it's because your identity is public online already, the company has nothing else to gain maybe other than the payment information and you can get a new card if they just happened to be untrustworthy.
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 just tried to enable it, they want $15/month.
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?
- And there are other alternatives besides.
  If you have a Discover card they'll do the monitoring/removal for free.
Almost got a heart attack when I read that they made a subscription service.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For $8.99 a month under its annual subscription, Mozilla says it will automatically keep a lookout for your information at over 190 sites where brokers sell information they’ve gathered from online sources like social media sites, apps, and browser trackers, and when your info is found, it will automatically try to get it removed.
Mozilla Monitor product manager Tony Cinotto told The Verge in an email that Mozilla partners with a company called Onerep to perform these scans and subsequent takedown requests.
Mozilla will keep trying, he added, but will also give Plus members instructions for attempting removal themselves.
Basic Monitor members will get a free scan and one-time removal sweep, plus continual monthly data broker scans afterward, Mozilla says.
Mozilla says its data broker scans can find details online like your name and current and previous home addresses but adds that it could go as deep as criminal history, hobbies, or your kids school district.
Services like this are fairly common, but they’re not all that well known to most people and searching for them is as likely to turn up sketchy scam sites as it is legitimate service providers like, for instance, DeleteMe.
The original article contains 325 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 40%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
- Exactly. I trust Mozilla, but I absolutely do not trust the broker sites to actually honor a request to remove data.
- 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 they added automatic online account collation and mass deletion I'd pay them $100 on the spot to wipe the hundreds of random accounts I have on sites/services I never use and often have never used.
I got downvoted to hell for saying it before, but what Ubuntu and Firefox are up to together is kinda what Microsoft went to court over Internet Explorer for in the 90s.
Firefox is my go-to today, but I'm watching them closely.
Edit: typical fanboy downvotes. The writing is on the wall. Mark my words y'all. In 2035 you'll be saying "get off Firefox" like you're currently saying "get off chrome". I've seen this song and dance before.
Also, look at this super cool not disgusting abomination of a bug that's not a bug. Remap my fucking root directory?
Read on
- what Ubuntu and Firefox are up to together is kinda what Microsoft went to court over Internet Explorer for in the 90s.
  Can you elaborate on the statement? I'm not connecting the dots.
  
  Maybe it's about firefox coming pre-installed in ubuntu, not sure either
- super cool not disgusting abomination of a bug that's not a bug. Remap my fucking root directory?
  I am not convinced that's what's going on. It looks more like some weird thing snap does to make hunspell available to snap Firefox.
  Have you seen this behavior on your own Ubuntu install? In other words, can you reproduce the described scenario?
  
  Yes. I literally have a cron job to unmount and rename my root directory to / that runs every 12 hours.
- What stuff? Snap? The official flatpak? The official deb repository?

70 comments