Mozilla is launching a new paid subscription privacy monitoring service called MozillaMonitorPlus. Mozilla says it will automatically monitor your information on more than 190 websites where brokers sell information they collect from online sources such as social media sites, apps and browser trackers, and once it discovers your information, it will automatically try to delete it.
MozillaMonitor product manager Tony Cinotto told The Verge in an email that Mozilla works with a company called Onerep to perform these scans and subsequent removal requests. While it usually takes seven to 14 days to process requests, he said sometimes information cannot be removed. He added that Mozilla will continue to try, but will also provide Plus members with instructions for trying to remove them themselves.
Mozilla said BasicMonitor members will receive a free scan and a one-time cleanup scan, and will continue to receive data broker scans every month. This paid subscription builds on the free dark web monitoring of MozillaMonitor (formerly FirefoxMonitor), a service Mozilla first launched in 2018. Mozilla has also offered other privacy-focused services over the past few years, such as MozillaVPN and FirefoxRelay.
Mozilla says its data broker scans can find details like your name, current and previous home addresses online, but it can also drill down into criminal history, hobbies, or your children's school districts.
Services like this are fairly common, but most people don't know much about them, and searching for them is likely to turn up fake scam sites, while legitimate service providers, like DeleteMe, are harder to find. That makes it difficult to identify trustworthy companies, which is where Mozilla's reputation as a privacy-first subsidiary of the open source nonprofit Mozilla Foundation can help.
MozillaMonitorPlus now costs $8.99 per month, while the standard version of MozillaMonitor remains free.