Today, Mozilla Monitor (previously called Firefox Monitor), a free service that notifies you when your email has been part of a breach, announced its new p
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.
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 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.