I love the idea! $8.99 per month is a bit steep…
EDIT: Thinking more about the price, Mozilla is mostly funded by Google but this is a blatantly anti-advertising/anti-Google move. Mozilla must be trying to establish a new revenue stream to get themselves independent of Google. It’s a balls-y move!
If I’m correct in that thinking it does help justify the cost and put it in context.
I have to imagine that most of these data brokers don’t have automated ways to remove information, it’s probably designed to be as annoying as possible to prevent people from doing it en-masse. If someone on mozilla’s end has to fill out a form and mail it and deal with ~200 brokers worth of constant intentional subtle constant changes (designed to break automation) to try and make services like this harder, the $9/mo seems almost reasonable.
pushes glasses up nose Ackchually…
The recent CPRA regulation in CA has essentially mandated automated data deletion requests. Technically it only applies to CA residents, but it’s so hard to disprove residency that most companies will process requests from anybody.
It only went into effect last year, but yeah - everybody I’m aware of has implemented an api for processing requests.
I think $9/mo is pretty fair to cover paying for the engineering and infrastructure to support their ongoing integration efforts.
That said, you could absolutely build something yourself that sends automated requests to every data broker you can find, but… Mozilla already knows where they are and will be looking for more. It’s going to become a game of whack a mole as companies that haven’t received deletion requests will have more complete (and thus more valuable) data sets.
If you don’t want to just leave it on though - just this a couple times a year as a sort of spring-cleaning event should cut down your presence on ad rolls significantly.
I have Incogni and they have a “compliance score” for each. I highly doubt any of it is manual (besides initial research & setup) considering there’s 120+ brokers listed on my dashboard and they send follow-up and re-requests when necessary
I mean yeah they can’t make everything free you know. Its good they are making services and I will be happy to support them!
8.99/month seems mostly competitive to Incogni which is a similar service that costs 12.98/month (they’ll give you a 50% discount if you buy a full year at once, which works out to 6.49/month). Although with as many sponsor spots as I see Incogni buy from YouTube creators, they are probably flush with investor capital, and trying to get as many subscribers as they can, before slowly “raising” their prices by offering fewer discounts.
I don’t think it’s steep at all given what you’re getting and you don’t need to run it forever. Additionally, all the private competitors in the space are terrible and many are all but technically scams that make the problem worse while also charging similarly.
The price isn’t unheard of, but it’s got plenty of competition. A few competitors from AlternativeTo:
Service price/year EasyOptOuts $19.99 Optery $39.00 - 249.00 PrivacyHawk $74.99 Incogni $77.88 OneRep* $99.96 Mozilla $107.88 DeleteMe $129.00 PrivacyBee $197.00 * Mozilla is selling a repackaged version of OneRep, charging more per year but a little less per month
Mozilla also has at least one product in their toolbelt that gives them the ability to resell private data to ad brokers, and it’s managed by the same DPO as other Mozilla products…
Category of data Mozilla sells to… Browsing history Advertising partners Search history Advertising partners Your device’s precise location Advertising partners Records of personal property, products or services purchased, obtained, or considered Advertising partners Other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies Advertising partners Inferences drawn from other personal information to create a profile Advertising partners I wonder… If you sign up for this service, will Mozilla opt you out of these sales?
You could just pay $8.99 for one month, delete the data from the brokers, and cancel the plan
Yeah that’s a bit pricey for me. I might pay for one month a year or something like that…
Site feels deceptive.
Big box: Enter your email for a free scan!
Hit big blue button that says “Get free scan!”
Next page is enter your password to create a free account.
:-(
I agree it’s shitty, but its so that they can tell you later if your email does the leaked!
Not really in this case. It’s for the free one-time scan, I wasn’t signing up for the service.
I like the idea of this sort of thing, but it always ultimately comes down to placing some kind of trust in the data brokers. This seems foolish to me because they clearly have no interest whatsoever in complying with this sort of thing unless they are forced to.
Hell, if I were a proper scumbag I’d make harvesting the information of people who requested it taken down my business. Exclusive demographic, low cost business model ;-)
Hopefully Mozella have thought of this and mix a bunch of trash data with their searches and requests… or some other scheme to minimize the impact of “bad actors” in the data harvesting industry.
i mean it’s just your firefox account, which you presumably already have
I probably should but I don’t. Firefox is strongly associated with my nostalgia for a time when few things required one.
Either this hasn’t launched yet or it’s for the USA only, since the links just take me to the regular Mozilla Monitor service.
“At launch, the Monitor Plus free scan and paid subscription service will be offered to people based in the United States.”
We’ll have to see how long it takes to spread elsewhere.
inb4 “buT M0zILlA sHouLd fOCuS oNlY iN ThE brOWsEr!!!1111”
Also:
$8.99, which is effectively $9, which is effectively $10
At that price it better all of it goes to the effort and not of it to the CEO.
I paid for the yearly subscription to support Mozilla.
Sounds good for users who care about privacy, but couldnt continue reading because…da fuk! I hate subsctiptions. Im probably mad for no reason lol
