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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

#81

Post by cwales95 »

Vinnl wrote: post #13
Flimm wrote: 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.

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.)

I'm also not clear why this is US only. There's definitely a market in other areas of the world. I'd be interested to know why it should be US only.

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

#82

Post by wolverine876 »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #38

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…

Thank you for the comparison. Perhaps someone who uses it can add info on Consumer Reports' Permission Slip?

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

#83

Post by pluc »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #47
pluc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That ability is not the product they're offering though, that's something you can already once you identify where your data is. And obviously that's if they have a way for you to do request removal and if they feel like doing it at all which are the same constraints for Mozilla. I think this is all purely for convenience of having it all done for you (which is okay)

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

#84

Post by anjel »

beyondd wrote: post #60
eltondegeneres wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of the issues are OneRep's affiliate partnerships with the very data brokers you're paying them to remove you from: https://imgur.com/a/juSC66b

OneRep is the service I used, briefly. I have no Affilliation with them except as past customer. They delivered as promised and the effect has been persistent 2+ years since the time I discontinued the subscription.

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

#85

Post by wolverine876 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #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.

In fairness, Mozilla can't make a law.

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

#87

Post by wolverine876 »

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 also wonder if it stops them from collecting it. Also, what are the legal requirements if a customer asks their data to be removed?

Still, I'm not giving up a plausible solution because potentially it's only a partial solution.

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

#88

Post by wolverine876 »

Vinnl wrote: post #9
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?

The data brokers that show your info will be listed, so you can spot check them yourself to see if they still show you. Not perfect, but should give you some confidence that if it says your data has been removed, it actually has been removed. (You can scan for brokers before upgrading to Plus for automatic opt-out, so you can also check beforehand that you can see your data.)

That doesn't account for them retaining your data and simply toggling the 'Publish' flag from 1 to 0.

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

#89

Post by beyondd »

HaloZero wrote: post #72
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.

I'm curious, what's the point of paying for Optery per year? Isn't removing your data be a one time request. Except for supporting new brokers that might appear.

Your point is spot on. Data removal services have an aspect where a ton of value is obtained in the first 1 - 4 months as the majority of profiles are wiped away, and then after that you're sort of in maintenance mode where the service catches profiles as they pop back up, or when new data brokers are added to the system for coverage.

Optery generally has 2 types of customers:

- The first type are those that care a lot about their privacy and the cost of an ongoing subscription is insignificant to them, so they keep the service running on an ongoing basis for the ongoing automated scans and removals and for getting new data brokers they get coverage for immediately as they are added into the system.

- The second type of customer is more price conscious and is basically looking back and forth between their credit card statement and their Optery dashboard each month and then they either pause or cancel the subscription when they feel they're reached a good stopping point. Optery's pause subscription feature is very popular for this type of customer and you can use it to automatically re-start the service in 3, 6, 9 months, etc.

- Another thing to point out is many other services only offer Yearly subscriptions, Optery offers Yearly or Monthly. If you're price conscious, the Monthly is nice because you can turn it on and off, or pause it as you wish.

More detail on the topic of keeping Optery running on an ongoing basis is on the Optery Help Desk here:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/why-should-i-keep-my-opte...

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

#90

Post by m3047 »

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…

Nothing is impossible in tech. (Rhetorical hyperbole!) But seriously let me give you an analogous example, with its pros and cons.

DNS now has something widely deployed called "query name minimization". For no particular reason other than it made server's lives easy (which it does, as we will explain) the recursion process historically sent the actual qname (what was asked for) to each nameserver contacted.

Much was made of this in recent years, that this leaked potentially important information to servers which demonstrably couldn't have the actual answer for the qname (even if they could provide a useful referral).

Two flavors of qname minimization exist in the field. One flavor asks qtype A questions of the form "_.example.com" until it triangulates on the server with the answer; the other asks qtype NS questions (regardless of the actual qtype). (In case you've noticed a change in the mix of your DNS traffic.) In a nutshell, qname minimization asks questions which enable it to triangulate on the server which can potentially answer the question, before sending the actual question to it.

A good rule of thumb is that with a cold cache qname minimization will result in nearly twice as many queries being issued / answered during the resolution process, assuming nothing goes wrong. Both of these approaches are prone to mistakes when servers don't conform to assumptions about how proper DNS should operate.

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