Mozilla is introducing a new paid subscription privacy monitoring service called Mozilla Plus Monitor. For $8.99 a month under its annual subscription, Mozilla says it will automatically keep an eye on your information on more than 190 sites where brokers sell information they've collected from online sources like social media sites, apps and browser trackers, and when your information is found, it will automatically try to delete it.
Tony Cinotto, product manager at Mozilla Monitor, said The edge in an email that Mozilla partners with a company called onerep to perform these scans and subsequent removal requests. While requests typically take 7 to 14 days to process, he says sometimes information cannot be deleted. Mozilla will keep trying, he added, but will also instruct Plus members to try removing them themselves.
Basic Monitor members will get a free scan and a one-time removal sweep, plus ongoing monthly scans of subsequent data brokers, Mozilla says. The paid subscription builds on free dark web monitoring from Mozilla Monitor (formerly Firefox Monitor), a service Mozilla debuted in 2018. Mozilla has offered other privacy-focused services in recent years, such as Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay .
Mozilla says its data broker scans can find online details like your name and current and previous addresses, but adds that it could go as far as a criminal record, hobbies or your children's school district.
Services like this are quite common, but they are not well known to most people and searching for them is just as likely to turn up suspicious scam sites as legitimate service providers such as DeleteMe. That makes it difficult to find trustworthy companies, which is really where Mozilla's reputation as a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit, open source organization, could help.
Mozilla Monitor Plus is now available for $8.99 per month, while the standard Mozilla Monitor remains free.
