Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 206 posts

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

#161

Post by Jommi »

hedora wrote: post #158
beyondd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optery also has a Help Desk article on this catch-22 where in order to opt out of data broker sites, you must first tell them who you are, otherwise, how else would they know who to opt out: https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-information-does-opt...

They could use a bloom filter with some sort of a cryptographic hash. On a hit, the data broker could challenge them to compute a salted hash of the "matched" data. If the salted hash matched, the data broker would remove the data. I think the same algorithms that are used for password storage would work for this without modification (except the data broker would pick different salts during each session, and you'd se…

its called a ZKP

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

#162

Post by politician »

hedora wrote: post #158
beyondd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optery also has a Help Desk article on this catch-22 where in order to opt out of data broker sites, you must first tell them who you are, otherwise, how else would they know who to opt out: https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-information-does-opt...

They could use a bloom filter with some sort of a cryptographic hash. On a hit, the data broker could challenge them to compute a salted hash of the "matched" data. If the salted hash matched, the data broker would remove the data. I think the same algorithms that are used for password storage would work for this without modification (except the data broker would pick different salts during each session, and you'd se…

No company wants to implement this. I've been involved in efforts to use this approach with hospitals -- a perfect PII-preserving situation -- that went nowhere. We got it working with a startup once where we published the bloom filter to reduce the traffic load for the counterparty. Do you know what they did? They reverse engineered the filter by blasting it with every key and cached the result.

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

#163

Post by CharlesW »

beyondd wrote: post #156
johnkpaul wrote: post #129

Do any of these offer family plans? I feel like At these price points, I would really like to sign up everyone in my household. The FAQ pages seem to all imply individual and I don't think I'm asking for a "business" or "enterprise" option.

Optery offers a family plan: https://www.optery.com/family/

As feedback for the CEO, that "family pricing" landing page really does you a disservice by obfuscating your pricing (unless that was the goal). At a minimum, add a pricing calculator with a slider for "family members".

For comparison, see Onerep's very clear pricing page here: https://onerep.com/pricing

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

#164

Post by beyondd »

CharlesW wrote: post #163
beyondd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optery offers a family plan: https://www.optery.com/family/

As feedback for the CEO, that "family pricing" landing page really does you a disservice by obfuscating your pricing (unless that was the goal). At a minimum, add a pricing calculator with a slider for "family members". For comparison, see Onerep's very clear pricing page here: https://onerep.com/pricing

That's great feedback! We'll add more pricing detail to the Family page. For comparison, here is the Optery pricing page: https://www.optery.com/pricing/

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

#165

Post by rdgddffd »

devrand wrote: post #97
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Permission Slip by CR with limited success. I use @ . , and you cannot enter a wildcard in Permission Slip.

I use this pattern but I'm starting to move away from it. Some things just don't work (ex. linking accounts between companies) and it also throws customer service agents into a panic when they see their own company name in the e-mail address. I'm also not sure it gets me that much. I do get to see how was compromised or sold my data, but most of that just goes to spam anyway. I also usually find out about the comprom…

Try just rot13 or hashing the website name.

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

#167

Post by rdgddffd »

dylan604 wrote: post #17
causal wrote: post #3

I like this in theory, I don't have time to chase down every data broker to opt-out on my own. I'm just wondering how I can measure whether it's really effective or not. Anyone have experience with this kind of thing?

This is always my pessimistic view of the world we live in today. Why in the world would they delete that data vs just putting it on mute/ignore/etc? The only "proof" you have is if you send a request to see the data they hold on you. If they send you an empty report because the ignore flag was set, you would only see an empty report. You have no evidence that the data was actually deleted.

I get your point but also this is what whistleblower laws are for. A lot of times it’s in the company’s best interest to comply… until 50%+ of the population opts out

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

#168

Post by Vinnl »

erinnh wrote: post #55
Vinnl wrote: 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.

It’s an ok way to do it. And I’ve been subscribed (but not using it) for 2 years. But until Firefox Relay supports custom domains, I am of the opinion that it’s not ideal.

As someone who also runs their own custom email domains, I agree it would be nice if I could manage those through Relay. That said, I'd still be giving out Relay addresses way more often, since those email addresses can't be linked to each other, or to me.

My personal domain is for things that are really important in the long term, but for things like concert tickets, I prefer having the added anonymity.

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

#169

Post by Vinnl »

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 am from the EU, so tell me about it :) But yes, the sibling comment is right: this isn't something you can expand to other countries with the push of a button.

Personally, for this specific functionality, I don't think the EU wouldn't be at the top of the list though: these types data brokers are way more of a problem in other countries. We have laws like GDPR :)

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

#170

Post by Vinnl »

callalex wrote: post #112
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.)

What’s wrong with simply displaying/linking to a list of supported countries?

The "list" is:

- USA

It is listed in places, but clearly not explicitly enough in the right places.

Post reply on HN