Mozilla’s services beyond its Firefox browser have been experiencing a shake-up lately — and the bumpy ride isn’t over yet. The company is now dropping its partner for Mozilla Monitor Plus, its paid data-broker cleanup service.
The news comes in the wake of the discovery that the CEO of OneRep, which currently handles the removal of information from people-finding sites for Mozilla, also previously started dozens of such websites. Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security, who uncovered the affiliation in mid-March, reports that one of the data broker websites is still active — and that Dimitri Shelest, OneRep’s CEO, still maintains an ownership stake in it.
Data brokers scrape your personal information (like your current and previous addresses, known relatives, phone numbers, social security number, and more) from public records and private databases, then collate them into profiles that they sell through people-finder websites. Anyone can pay a nominal fee for your data. To combat this privacy issue, Mozilla teamed up with OneRep to offer Monitor Plus, a $9 per-month subscription, to help remove users from these many websites — a highly time-consuming process to do on your own.
In response to Krebs’ findings, Mozilla will be ending its partnership with OneRep, and transitioning to a new service to power its Monitor Plus subscription. A timeline for the switch is not yet known.
Mozilla Monitor Plus launched in early February of this year as an upgrade to the company’s existing free lookup tool. It monitors for user info in data leaks (through a tie-in with Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned service) as well as on data broker sites (via OneRep), and assists in automatically sending opt-out requests to the data broker sites (also through OneRep). Monitor Plus remains the only service left untouched by Mozilla’s mid-February announcement of cuts to its privacy and security initiatives.
