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

blog.mozilla.org

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

#141

Post by wolverine876 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #138
wolverine876 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Mozilla can't make a law.

Sure, but they are also treating it as a business opportunity, just like the people compiling the data are. They should perhaps be pushing on the legal aspect of what's wrong with the situation rather than making money from it.

You're assuming they are driven by a business opportunity; I have no evidence of their motives (do you?), but another way to see it:

There is no law and no prospect of one soon. Mozilla can partially solve the problem by providing the service - I think that's great. Otherwise people would have less recourse.

And also, Mozilla must have money to operate; charging for this service seems among the least-bad options.

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

#142

Post by mynameisvlad »

isodev wrote: post #51
Vinnl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that. The form should only be shown for people in the USA, but detecting the country you're in can't be done perfectly. Which is a good reminder - we'll look into making the US-only part clearer. (I'm an engineer on Monitor.)

Or perhaps, just thinking out loud, you could extend support for the service to other countries. The EU would love you for this at the very least.

I'm sure if it was as easy as snapping their fingers, they'd have done it.

Time is a finite resource, and a lot of these data brokers seem to be very geographically-specific and have their own ways of requesting deletion.

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

#143

Post by lancesells »

dataflow wrote: post #27

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…

Could there be some sort of Robin Hood action to all of this? What if you took all the leaked data about millions of people and used that to opt out them out of all the various services that buy and then sell the data?

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

#144

Post by PascLeRasc »

ary wrote: 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.

Discover bank also offers something like this for free, but I can't tell if it's as capable as other services. https://www.discover.com/security/online-privacy-protection/

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

#145

Post by hammyhavoc »

wolverine876 wrote: post #141
hammyhavoc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but they are also treating it as a business opportunity, just like the people compiling the data are. They should perhaps be pushing on the legal aspect of what's wrong with the situation rather than making money from it.

You're assuming they are driven by a business opportunity; I have no evidence of their motives (do you?), but another way to see it: There is no law and no prospect of one soon. Mozilla can partially solve the problem by providing the service - I think that's great. Otherwise people would have less recourse. And also, Mozilla must have money to operate; charging for this service seems among the least-bad options.

Well, we arrive at the whole "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" train of thought, otherwise there is no money-making opportunity.

They push on the legal aspects of other problems, but I don't see them pushing on the legal aspects of this.

Mozilla receives half a billion dollars per year from Google, making up most of their revenue. Mozilla's CEO is also paid millions of dollars each year. If they can't survive as-is whilst paying out those kinds of salaries with such revenue, that's a management problem.

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

#146

Post by kiliancs »

causal wrote: post #4
kiliancs wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Not sure I understand how this comment follows the announcement. What about it makes you lose trust in Mozilla?

The consistent lack of focus. I should have elaborated in my comment.

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

#147

Post by hangonhn »

I really wish employers would pay for a service like this because a lot of spear phishing attacks start with data stole or scraped from brokers, LinkedIn, etc. If a company buys a service like this in bulk, it can get significant discounts. Personally I've resorted to hiding my information on LinkedIn and noticed that I've been passed over by attackers while my coworkers get spear phishing attacks all the time.

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

#148

Post by andirk »

dataflow wrote: post #27

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…

With an American SSN, one could dump 1,000 queries of numbers with only 1 of them being the client's actual SSN so the logs don't reveal as much. Still, though, it's a Catch 22 to find the thing you don't want found by using that thing.

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

#149

Post by pietro72ohboy »

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #24
doix wrote: post #8

> Privacy starts with a Mozilla Account I like how the solution to the privacy issue is _yet another account_. I don't know why, but I find it highly amusing. I do get it, you need to share your details with them so they know which details to delete, but I still can't help but laugh.

I attempted to use this, entered my email, was prompted with a "create your account" page, laughed out loud and closed the tab. This is a comical misunderstanding of what the product even IS or DOES.

How do they think they’re supposed to do their job if they don’t even have a way to identify you in the first place. What is comical is your blend of ignorance of the technical needs of the product and arrogance to suggest that it should be done in this “magical anonymous way” that nobody seems to grok.

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

#150

Post by gzer0 »

lancesells wrote: post #143
dataflow wrote: post #27

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…

Could there be some sort of Robin Hood action to all of this? What if you took all the leaked data about millions of people and used that to opt out them out of all the various services that buy and then sell the data?

That is a possibility. Another scenario is one in which you sign up to a service like Optery and submit a non-existent individual with fabricated information for PII removal; after about a month or so, this fabricated individual started showing up as a possible person that lived at my address when I was trying to get a quote from Progressive.

So, seems like somewhere in the midst of this process, one of the 240 brokers that Optery sends your information to get it removed, someone aggregated it, sold it to Progressive and in the underground realm of data brokers and buying and selling data, someone unfortunately (or fortunately?) is now targeting 'Paige Notfound' and 'Meg A. Byte'.

I got the last laugh! :)

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