Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Mozilla Monitor is shady (self.privacy)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Daughter3546 to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Onerep is a privacy monitoring service/ privacy provider that Mozilla partnered with for their Mozilla Monitor service.

Yesterday, Brian Krebs (a cybersecurity journalist) dug into Onerep and found that the CEO is a shady Belarussian. Dimitri Shelest, CEO, of Onerep owns multiple “people searching” websites. Shelest has also been linked to aggressive spam and affiliate marketing emails.

Onerep’s reputation is shady due to their CEO’s multiple conflicts of interest. At worst, Onerep is sucking your personal information. At best, you’re paying for a service that doesn’t do anything. Either way, I would not trust Mozilla Monitor service .

This is a copy and paste from a post I made to [email protected]. I do not no know how to crosspost and I apologise for my mistake a head of time.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's the thing, Mozilla keeps talking about diversifying to avoid becoming irrelevant, but those diversification efforts seem to only involve finding a shiny new thing, chasing it, then dropping it and laying off 60 employees. And then pursuing the next shiny new thing

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Agreed. They have so many options for privacy-respecting value adds, but they often fall short. For example, their VPN:

was a rebranded Mullvad (fine) with fewer features (lame)
no integration with Firefox (missed opportunity)
eventually integrated it with Container Tabs, but it's still not advertised on their landing page

They picked a good vendor, but they missed so many opportunities to really make it a standout feature.

And there's more they could do like that:

private, local only ads with revenue share with sites
create a Mozilla payment network using GNU Taler or similar; you'd pay Mozilla to get credits (potentially with crypto if you don't trust Mozilla with payment info), and sites would opt in to accept those credits, and the user remains anonymous
integrate with popular password management service like Bitwarden - have it work seamlessly with their other offerings

There's plenty more ideas like that as well. However, I don't trust Mozilla to actually follow through with any of them since they've dropped the ball every other time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I really, really like the idea of paying content creators some amount of a monthly budget based on site views.

My only critique of your really thoughtful comment is: I really want those features to be modular. Every time Mozilla drops an extension like Pocket and integrates it directly into the browser, it seems to upset two groups of people:

People who don't want the extension, who are now forced to tolerate or remove it
People who do want the extension, who tend to be disappointed with the way the integration is accomplished.

I can guarantee after watching Brave do their crap that people generally don't want a browser installing an ad network or a VPN without their consent, especially when the browser is already considered pretty big like Firefox. Chrome might suck, but it's practically a minimalist browser compared to Firefox... If not in function, then at least in presentation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I really want those features to be modular

Oh absolutely, and that's a huge part of why I don't really trust Mozilla to handle it properly.

Brave

That's because Brave didn't deliver on its promise. It said it would pay content creators, but it didn't. It should absolutely be opt-in for both parties (user and site).

So until there's an ethical way to handle advertising, I'll keep my ad-blocker.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's an interesting conversation to be had about that. Personally, due to its for-profit beginnings, I don't think Brave would have done a good job even if they had followed through on their promises. For example, cryptocurrency has its own issues, and there are ethical problems with replacing a website owner's chosen source of income with reliance on a different, proprietary one.

Mozilla would have to advance much further with Firefox and everything else before any of that is worthy of discussion, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

cryptocurrency has its own issues

I disagree, but it's irrelevant to this discussion. The goal is micro-payments to content creators in-lieu of advertisements and/or profit sharing for advertisements. That could use cryptocurrency, or it could use traditional bank transactions.

And yeah, I agree that there are ethical issues here, which is why Mozilla shouldn't put their own ads on a page w/o the content creator opting in. That's where Brave went wrong, and where I hope Mozilla could get it right.

I think they just need a few big names to agree to it. Mozilla should implement some kind of credit system (i.e. to fund Mozilla VPN and other paid offerings), and make a way to keep track of page views in an anonymous manner and pilot it with some big-name brands (e.g. New York Times or similar). Initially, it would just be micropayments per page view in exchange for no ads, but Mozilla could add their own ads using your local search history (never shared with Mozilla or the website) in-lieu of ads supplied by the vendor.

There is an ethical way to do it, but Brave isn't it and I don't trust Mozilla to do it properly.

[–] Daughter3546 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You couldn't have said it better. If money and revenue is an issue, then why keep chasing the next shiny thing.

Just last month, they had a press release announcing they'll incorporate AI into their product suite. In my opinion, the release was just a buzzword laden nonsense. I just don't see the why other than to keep themselves relevant.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I did some digging into FakeSpot's history. I don't have the pages handy, but they didn't call themselves an AI company until 2022. I doubt anything changed. And at one point, they were even dabbling with NFT verification (something they've since purged from their site).

Mozilla is chasing trends by... Buying other companies that are also chasing trends.