God bless the Mozilla foundation
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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How can they know it's your data without first collecting your data to compare it?
"Give us your personal information so we can ask others to delete your personal information" just doesn't sound like a trustworthy offer.
I can also see the irony. But I can't imagine another way to do it at any scale. Do you know of another option?
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Unless you trust Mozilla. I'm unaware of another organization that is more trustworthy, despite the haters mad that CEOs make money.
The CEO is making an inordinate amount of money. $6.9 million is excessive.
You can argue that Mozilla should be held to the same low standard as every other corporation, but if you do that, you have to take into account that the Mozilla CEO got a huge pay raise in a year where other CEOs got less money.
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Likely you must provide Mozilla with basic identifying data like name and birth date. Which isn't all that radical since you're giving them quite a bit more by paying them.
It's better when it's in their hands, because:
- It's Mozilla - one of the more trusty organizations out there.
- They don't get your information in some sneaky way from some source that was never supposed to be available to them.
- You know exactly how they make money from your data.
It's ironic yeah, but if trust is the only way to implement something like this, then Mozilla is probably the one company I would trust considering they're a non-profit org.
There isn't a better company to do this than mozzila. I mean there literally are but in practice this is a good thing
The way I see it, if you're asking for data removal, it's because your identity is public online already, the company has nothing else to gain maybe other than the payment information and you can get a new card if they just happened to be untrustworthy.
There are already plenty of companies that sell managed data removal like this, Mozilla claims to be doing it better and perhaps they are incrementally more trustworthy than the smaller no name ones
Discover does it for free, but they only do so on a handful of sites.
Decided to try it out, 489 request in progress vs the 10 from a year with Discovers free takedowns.
I think it was only 3 when I first signed up, so that's an improvement. They probably hit the ones most likely to honor takedown requests, but yeah 190 sites is more than 10. $9 is more than $0 too though, so it's a balance.
I wonder how many sites like this actually exist. Probably over a thousand would be my guess.
If I’m reading this correctly, are they basically just reselling the Onerep service ($14.95/monthly or $99.96/annually) for $8.99/month?
They're reselling it for $13.99/monthly or $107.88/annually.
So it's cheaper if you buy it for just one month at a time, but more expensive for the annual subscription... And there are other alternatives besides.
And there are other alternatives besides.
If you have a Discover card they'll do the monitoring/removal for free.
Discover only removes it from ten sites.
Oh, thanks. I didn't know.
Almost got a heart attack when I read that they made a subscription service.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For $8.99 a month under its annual subscription, Mozilla says it will automatically keep a lookout for your information at over 190 sites where brokers sell information they’ve gathered from online sources like social media sites, apps, and browser trackers, and when your info is found, it will automatically try to get it removed.
Mozilla Monitor product manager Tony Cinotto told The Verge in an email that Mozilla partners with a company called Onerep to perform these scans and subsequent takedown requests.
Mozilla will keep trying, he added, but will also give Plus members instructions for attempting removal themselves.
Basic Monitor members will get a free scan and one-time removal sweep, plus continual monthly data broker scans afterward, Mozilla says.
Mozilla says its data broker scans can find details online like your name and current and previous home addresses but adds that it could go as deep as criminal history, hobbies, or your kids school district.
Services like this are fairly common, but they’re not all that well known to most people and searching for them is as likely to turn up sketchy scam sites as it is legitimate service providers like, for instance, DeleteMe.
The original article contains 325 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 40%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
services like this rely upon the data harvesters and brokers to honor removal requests. honest ones would. but there's tons of them that aren't legit, so it's like using a straw to empty lake superior.
Exactly. I trust Mozilla, but I absolutely do not trust the broker sites to actually honor a request to remove data.
Even for the “honest” data collectors I’m sceptical any of these services really work. Privacy and data protection laws are weak in many places, and even the countries that have enacted better legislation in this regard often have fairly toothless enforcement. Data is the new oil and is far too valuable for companies to want to part with. There seems little real incentive for companies to truthfully cooperate with these schemes.
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If they added automatic online account collation and mass deletion I'd pay them $100 on the spot to wipe the hundreds of random accounts I have on sites/services I never use and often have never used.
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