Have you ever Googled yourself and found a ton of results from “people finder” websites that contain your personal data? These data brokers have access to everything from your social media profiles to your real-world home address. They often make money by selling all kinds of information.
Mozilla, the developer of the popular web browser Firefox, Just launched A new service called mozilla monitor It states that it will force these data brokers to delete your information.
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Mozilla offers both a free plan that scans the web to find where your information is listed, and a paid plan that takes additional steps to automatically remove these listings from data broker websites. . A paid plan for Mozilla Monitor Plus costs $13.99 per month, or $8.99 per month if paid annually. This plan also includes continuous web monitoring for your convenience.
Mozilla Monitor is a reboot of Mozilla’s previous service, formerly known as Firefox Monitor. Initially, the free service simply monitored the web for instances where email was involved in a data breach. The focus appears to be on potential identity theft vulnerabilities, as such data breaches can expose individuals’ usernames and passwords, as well as credit card numbers and social security numbers. The latest version of the service, Mozilla Monitor, continues to provide this functionality, but now also includes data broker monitoring.
Data brokers are big business, with the industry estimated to be: $200 billion in revenue Every year — a lot is at stake when Mozilla rolls out this feature.
Most people don’t know that they can actually opt out of participation by data brokers. However, removing your information requires making separate requests to each data broker website, which can be a tedious process.
There are existing companies that offer removal services similar to Mozilla Monitor, but none are as large or well-known as the organization behind Firefox. Perhaps with Mozilla offering such a service, more people will become aware of how much of their personal information is being sold on the Internet.