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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy, 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?
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