Mozilla Monitor Plus Scrubs Your Leaked Personal Information From the Web, For a Fee (engadget.com) 26
Mozilla has rolled out a new $9 per month service called Mozilla Monitor Plus that automatically scrubs personal information from over 190 data broker sites. The tool builds on the free Firefox Monitor platform, expanding monitoring capabilities and proactively removing exposed details to protect user privacy. Subscribers will also receive data breach alerts under the new service.
Funny you need that (Score:2)
Here in Europe it happens to be illegal to do this. It is illegal to store or process any personal information without explicite informed consent. If somebody buys personal information for a data broker (who needs that informed consent as well) or gets it in any other way, they have to inform the data owners (the people the data refers to) within a month of this and of all non-trivial processing that will be done. Oh, and you can withdraw consent under some conditions and when the data is from when you were
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And how do you make it so that your private data does not leave Europe?
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You don't have to: the law always pertains to the person the data belongs to, not the company that stores it. Meaning if you store data of any European citizen, you're on the hook.
If it's a European citizen in Australia, GDPR applies.
It's exactly the same principle as the Cloud act: Doesn't matter where the servers are if it's a company that operates in the US.
Enforcing is indeed a legal mess, but hey, tit for tat...
Re: Funny you need that (Score:2)
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The GDPR protects the data of EU citizens, regardless of where the data is or where the EU citizen is. The question of enforcement is a bit more difficult and there the geolocation of the citizen plays a role.
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> if you are an EU citizen whose data is transferred outside the EU then the entities transferring it have to add the GDPRs [...]
Exactly.
This applies wherever the EU citizen is. Aren't extraterritorial laws fun?
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It is illegal if a US company does it too. The GDPR is not geographically restricted. In fact, the question of legal enforcement of the GDPR in the US for data belonging to EU citizens is the main Argument behind Schrems II and why sending or processing such data in the US is currently of very questionable legality.
Laws mean nothing if they can't be enforced (Score:2)
The EU privacy laws are no doubt a good idea, but enforcing them is virtually impossible. A company can simply shift its data to some other juristiction that european authorities have no access to and good luck to said authorities proving anything one way or the other.
A company may well *say* its deleted your data and no longer serve it up to you, but it'll more than likely still be somewhere on a backup disk/tape even if its been deleted from the main storage (which is frankly probably hasn't anyway).
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They work well enough to shrink the problem. Most companies that do business in the EU just comply and it’s certainly enough to change the outcome of a risk analysis.
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Indeed. And the GDPR is not actually aimed at stamping all misuse out. For example, the GDPR does not have personal punishments and gives offenders second chances. It is aimed to keep the abuses low and non-default and to give people subject to abuse legal redress. And that actually works reasonably well already and is bound to get better.
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Within limits. If a company shifts PII outside of the EU, it stays liable for what happens with that data. If it has an EU representation, punishments can be applied to it (based on their overall, global size). It has happened and it will continue to happen. Obviously, GDPR enforcement is in its infancy, but there already have been some harsh fines, data-transfer to the US was already close to being made illegal in general (the "Schrems II" ruling) and some companies in the EU have been essentially shutter
Does this include Google and Facebook? (Score:4, Informative)
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That's why I never whiteliste the various Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like in uBlock and previously Noscript.
Just about every website is infected with spyware from them. I don't even trust the big caching networks like Cloudflare and will block them unless I have no other choice.
Not that this will prevent info from being forwarded via the website itself, but at least it'll save my browser from downloading useless crap and possible virus sources directly.
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This doesn’t really resemble how tracking works in the real world unless you personally as an individual are extremely interesting to someone with the means and the care. Though I can see how all these pieces might get used more effectively in the very near future.
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Some of my very first posts here on /. 25+ years ago were about the evils of javascript. I've been unheeded.
Nice snake oil. (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's on the Internet, it's there forever.
Re:Nice snake oil. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just because 1 website goes offline doesn't mean your information that was posted on it disappears with it.
Information spreads. Especially juicy personal information.
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Personal information loses value as it ages. People move, circumstances change, email accounts die.
Thing is, if you have decent laws then it doesn't matter so much if your details are in some database somewhere. It's like stolen bank notes with serial numbers - they can't use it, without risking legal penalties.
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Many of those data brokers will take down information when requested. You can also provide them with decoy information, you can do this when you take online quizzes, enter sweepstakes, etc.
Barbra Streisand wants to know (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you scrub information from the internet, asking for Barbra Streisand.
And people wonder why (Score:2)
Mozilla has 3% of the browser market. https://gs.statcounter.com/bro... [statcounter.com]
Re: And people wonder why (Score:3)
Browsers don't make money unless Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon are paying you. There is no market for browsers in the sense that you mean. Number of users or installs isn't a real measure of market share when none of those users pay for it. I'd be more interested in the browser's income divided by the total spent in the market.
Don't like (Score:1)
I don't like the fact that these services even exist. Both Mozilla in this case, or Incogni or other such services, are incentivised to keep you paying, which means the best case for them is that if you stop paying, the data brokers somehow re-acquire and start peddling your data again ASAP. That is an unpleasantly symbiotic relationship that doesn't seem set up in your favour.
Once it's out, it's out. (Score:2)
If your data leaks, there's absolutely nothing you can do to "scrub it". Mozilla should be sued for making false claims.