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Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

blog.mozilla.org

41–50 of 206 posts

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#41
post #32
post #25

One of the ironies of these things is that they tend to map to a specific e-mail address, whereas the more paranoid of us who'd want to pay for a service like that tend to have different addresses, either entirely or something like Gmail with +filters. HIBP supports domain searches[^1] at least, but part of the problem is also how we keep trying to reinvent the e-mail system to not fall prey to this, much how Fastmai…

> In a sense, it sounds like the advice of the services is less subscribing to them than trying not to have a few e-mails that map to your personal identity. Firefox Relay is a great way to do that :) https://relay.firefox.com Integrating that with Monitor is pretty high on at least my personal wish list.

The phone masking looks great, too. Like Privacy.com, it's awesome with virtual alternatives for PII, except they don't tend to be available here in Europe, but I'm definitely jealous.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#42
post #7

I’m a happy, long term Optery user (not affiliated) and they take care of 100% of this for you. https://www.optery.com The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.

Also a satisfied Optery user. Been using their service for the past year, from what I can tell, they seem to have the most robust solution in the space.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#43
post #7

I’m a happy, long term Optery user (not affiliated) and they take care of 100% of this for you. https://www.optery.com The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.

I can't help but be a bit miffed that despite ostensibly being a privacy service, optery is still running a bunch of third party scripts on their site, including google...

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#44

Mozilla Monitor Plus - $14/mo, or $108/yr. Too pricey for most. >Every month, we use the information you provided about yourself (name, location and birthdate) to search across ⁨190⁩ data broker sites that sell people’s private information. If we find your data on any of these sites, we initiate the request for removal. Data removal can take anywhere from a day to a month. This feature is available for ⁨Monitor Plus⁩…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#45
post #41
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a sense, it sounds like the advice of the services is less subscribing to them than trying not to have a few e-mails that map to your personal identity. Firefox Relay is a great way to do that :) https://relay.firefox.com Integrating that with Monitor is pretty high on at least my personal wish list.

The phone masking looks great, too. Like Privacy.com, it's awesome with virtual alternatives for PII, except they don't tend to be available here in Europe, but I'm definitely jealous.

If you need a privacy.com alternative for the EU, Revolut is a good option. They offer both one-time-use (disposable) cards, as well as normal virtual cards that are valid until revoked. They're not as advanced as privacy.com AFAIK, cards that only work for a single merchant but multiple transactions aren't offered for example, but they're good enough for most purposes.

Eu regulations on card networks make such a service much harder to offer, privacy.com makes money on card fees, which you can't really do here. Such a service would either have to be paid or bundled with other services which you can make money on, which is what Revolut does.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#46

There is a service I've heard advertised on twit.tv podcasts called DeleteMe that I've been interested in that does a similar thing and seems to cover way more data brokers: https://joindeleteme.com/sites-we-remove-from/ OpenRep is another one I've seen mentioned. Covers 190+ sites: https://onerep.com/sites-we-remove-from One thing I can't find is a list of sites that Mozilla Monitor covers. Here's a comparison. I on…

It doesn't look like DeleteMe's individual plan covers 750+ sites. There are only 77 sites with a single asterisk on https://joindeleteme.com/sites-we-remove-from/

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#47
post #39
post #5

I wanted to try this, but it seems to be restricted to only people in the USA. It is impossible to enter a location outside the USA in the sign-up form, and it's impossible to skip that form. Please, Mozilla, make it much clearer which countries are supported to avoid causing this frustration and to give people a reason to come back once other countries are supported.

haveibeenpwned.com has been offering the same service for free for years.

It doesn't look the same to me.

haveibeenpwned will notify you if your email address was in a breach.

The Mozilla offering seems to include the same, but also cover other pieces of personal data, and the ability to request removal from data brokers.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#48
Not sure what I think about charging people to remove this information—are they not also just as bad? This seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't require a victim to pay for, but for law to enforce this not happening.

As with for-profit healthcare in the USA, just seems scumbag to profit off of misfortune and misery.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#49

Not sure if dumb question: If they use the data you provide (such as your address) to search other data brokers, doesn't that potentially give the data broker MORE information than they already had on you? Do the companies in this space prevent this somehow? Edit: Lest people think this is somehow impossible otherwise - all it should take would be to search for just your name + location, get the query results, then f…

It seems to me like this is a core problem with the scummy nature of this business. I’d like to believe you’re weong but have trouble given the business model.

Re: Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers

#50
post #7

I’m a happy, long term Optery user (not affiliated) and they take care of 100% of this for you. https://www.optery.com The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.

Especially with a backend service provider (onerep.com) that is questionable at best.

What are the issues with Mozilla's use of onerep?
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