via Mozilla
Some of the most profitable companies in the world base their entire business on selling your information. In some cases, it’s your interests. Building a profile of tags and interests that they can use to sell advertising space to other companies. That’s how Google, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook) work like this. However, there’s a more sinister kind as well. For a fee, they’ll sell someone your full name, address, phone number, family member names, and more. You can often find a person’s information with little more than a name, even a partial name, and a location or age. You would be shocked to find how little information can lead back to you. Thanks to websites that host and sell your personal information, your data is up for grabs.
There are multiple services online that will work against this. You give them your personal information, and they’ll find other instances of it across the web and remove it. There’s just one problem: some of those are as sketchy as the sites they promise to protect you from. Some people report having tested them by inputting an email and information they use for nothing, only to start getting spam on the address.
You want to protect yourself, but don’t know who to trust. Enter Mozilla. Mozilla has transformed into a privacy-focused company in the past few years. It’s not that they were ever privacy violators, but privacy wasn’t what set the brand apart. In the past few years, that changed dramatically, with Mozilla becoming one of the few online companies fighting to protect your privacy and your right to it. Now they have a new subscription that could make that easier than ever.
Mozilla’s Monitor (Plus)
Mozilla has had their Monitor product for a while. It’s been free to use, with the service sending you an email if your personal information was found in any leaks. Now, they have Mozilla Monitor Plus, to actively remove your data from across the web.
Mozilla Monitor Plus will continue to alert you to any data leaks that include your personal data. On top of that, Mozilla will go after “people search” sites that are selling your personal information. You could manually contact all of these sites to have them remove your data, but it’s a huge pain. After all, Mozilla will look at 190 sites for you. That’s a lot of emails you could have to send as frequently as once a month.
With Mozilla’s Monitor Plus, they’ll keep an eye on those sites for your personal data, constantly—ahem—monitoring them. If they find your data on these sites again, they’ll automatically ask the website to remove it on your behalf. Thanks to digital privacy laws in a few states and in Europe, companies generally comply quickly for fear of a hefty fine and lawsuit. If Mozilla can’t remove it automatically, they may give you instructions on actions you can take yourself.
Mozilla’s new service costs $8.99/month if you go for the yearly payment option. If you just want to pay monthly, perhaps pay for one month and just re-activate the service every few months to do another check, it’ll cost $14/month. I personally removed my information from a number of sites before, but Monitor Plus still found plenty of records of mine online.
Mozilla Monitor Plus is currently only available in the U.S., but with the country’s lax privacy laws, perhaps it’s a fantastic place to start a wider rollout. There are certainly other sites that do this. You should probably shop around. One reason to pick Mozilla Monitor Plus over others is their commitment to privacy. You can read their privacy policy here, and you may be surprised to find you won’t need a lawyer to interpret it for you, it’s quite easy to read. If you already trust Mozilla to protect other parts of your life, from email relays to the privacy-focused Firefox browser, why not give it a try?
Sources:
- Jenifer Boscacci, Mozilla
- Wes Davis, The Verge
- Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica