Mozilla Monitor Plus Scrubs Your Info From Data-Broker Sites (for a Price)
The nonprofit behind the Firefox browser wants you to add a new service to your privacy toolkit—and a new line item to your online-life expenses.
Mozilla Monitor Plus is a $13.99-per-month ($107.88 per year) service that will regularly scan more than 190 data-broker sites for your personal details and issue removal requests on your behalf. A reviewer’s guide says brokers typically comply with requests within seven to 14 days.
Monitor Plus represents an upsell from Mozilla’s current, free Monitor service, which does a one-time scan of the same sites and leaves it to you to submit removal requests to get your data taken down from them.
Data brokers collect enormous amounts of information about people from a variety of sources for resale to an equally wide variety of customers. Even the National Security Agency has admitted to being a regular buyer. The data they collect about any one person can be abused for identity theft; their accumulated info-inventories about millions of people have figured in data breaches.
Congress has spent years being useless on this front, both failing to pass any comprehensive digital-privacy law while also not acting on narrower bills such as a 2022 attempt to set up a universal opt-out from data brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has, however, begun taking more aggressive action against especially negligent brokers and is now considering writing data-protection regulations under its existing authority
That leaves customers in a self-help situation in which they can try to get personal details offline, which is now somewhat easier at Google, though many data brokers require people to first create an account to get them to delete your data. Or they can pay a service like Abine’s $129-per-year DeleteMe to do that work for them.
Like Abine’s offering, the free and paid versions of Mozilla Monitor will require you to provide some basic details about yourself so that this service can then locate data about you elsewhere.
Mozilla’s press release specifies “your first and last name, the current city and state that you live in, your date of birth, and your email address,” which it says will be stored encrypted and represents “the least amount of information we need to get the most accurate search results for you.”
Monitor Plus joins a few other subscription services now offered by Mozilla, such as the Mozilla VPN that it launched in 2020, a paid version of the Pocket bookmarking app that Mozilla bought in 2017, and a premium edition of the Firefox Relay email-privacy product.
Income from these additions has allowed Mozilla to chip away at its historic reliance on payments from Google to keep that search engine as the default in Firefox. Mozilla’s 2022 financial statement (PDF) listed $510.4 million in “royalties” (essentially, meaning from Google) and $75.7 million in “subscription and advertising revenue” (about a third more than in 2021).
Mozilla’s Firefox browser itself has seen its share of the browser market slump in recent years from the 31.5% figure for US desktops that StatCounter’s automated tracking reported in 2009. That share stood at 8.5% in January, a slight uptick from recent months that still left this open-source browser in fourth place after Google’s Chrome (58.7%), Microsoft’s Edge (16.7%), and Apple’s Safari (13.4%).
