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 firefox@lemmy.ml. I do not no know how to crosspost and I apologise for my mistake a head of time.
Yikes. This has the potential to seriously damage the reputation of Mozilla. I guess there are 3 possibilities:
Onerep isn't actually shady, but partnering with a company part of a conglomerate with companies directly opposing the stated goal isn't a good look either way
Onerep is shady and Mozilla failed to conduct the necessary research before partnering with them
Onerep is shady and Mozilla knew
In any case: Personally, I'll never not be grateful towards Mozilla for continuing to support and develop Firefox, which is quite literally the only relevant engine standing against the monopoly of chromium and all the bad that entails. But I trust other companies/initiatives/projects more when it comes to services other than the browser engine.
Mozilla partnered with Onerep (the company investigated by Brian Krebs) for their privacy monitoring service. The CEO of Onerep is linked to numerous "people lookup" websites.
I really love Firefox, but I dislike some of the initiatives the for-profit arm, Mozilla Corporation, is taking. This is another head scratcher moments for me. I want my browser to be just a browser. I don't want Pocket, Google Search, nor any other nonsense.
I get that they are subsiding the development costs of Firefox, but surely, there must be other avenues to generate revenue. It is really hypocritical of Mozilla when they market Firefox as a privacy focused alternative to Chrome/Edge/Safari and then bundle ads and sponsored nonsense.
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
It's indeed not a good look anyway to be partnering (without doing much that sharing your brand, and thus trust invested in you) with somebody apparently solving the problem... they themselves help fuel.
This reminds me of that one virus where you put your Credit Card info into the shady website to check that "your card is not in any hacker database" lmao
Update, March 15, 11:35 a.m. ET: Many readers have pointed out something that was somehow overlooked amid all this
research: The Mozilla Foundation, the company that runs the Firefox Web browser, has launched a data removal service
called Mozilla Monitor service that bundles OneRep. That notice says Mozilla Monitor is offered as a free or paid
subscription service.
“The free data breach notification service is a partnership with Have I Been Pwned (“HIBP”),” the Mozilla Foundation
explains. “The automated data deletion service is a partnership with OneRep to remove personal information published on
publicly available online directories and other aggregators of information about individuals (“Data Broker Sites”).”
In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Mozilla said they did assess OneRep’s data removal service to confirm
it acts according to privacy principles advocated at Mozilla.
“We were aware of the past affiliations with the entities named in the article and were assured they had ended prior to our
work together,” the statement reads. “We’re now looking into this further. We will always put the privacy and security of our
customers first and will provide updates as needed.”
It's like a twisted mustache twirling disney villanesque version of data leak conspiracies. Only way I can think of for this to be funnier is if it turns out the dude also had a prominent position in some secret police state agency.
It does sound like a conspiracy and I am advocating to wait until Mozilla addresses the concern. In my opinion, it's likely an oversight and failure to do their due diligence.