5 ms·

Mozilla says it's finally done with Onerep

124 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

netule 1y ago
Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. > Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1] [1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
- dralley 1y ago
  >Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud. This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.
  - kgwxd 1y ago
    Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit?
  - PunchyHamster 1y ago
    But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ?
  - johannes1234321 1y ago
    There are however two options available: * Make the browser development the charitable work, or * accept funding to non-charitable company However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
    - alwa 1y ago
      Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work? From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]: > As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have. Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
      - hrimfaxi 1y ago
        Yes. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business-income-tax https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
        amadeuspagel 1y ago
        > Even though an organization is recognized as tax exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business income. So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year...
      - glenstein 1y ago
        Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.
  - icepush 1y ago
    You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - spelk 1y ago
      I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
    - fhd2 1y ago
      Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.
  - ehutch79 1y ago
    sell $50 keychains. done.
    - input_sh 1y ago
      The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously). Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
    - glenstein 1y ago
      They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/ https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/
- abawany 1y ago
  it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    Thunderbird gets $3 million and search licensing gets between $500-600 million.
    - abawany 1y ago
      In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?
      - glenstein 1y ago
        Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea. Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference. Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement. Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
        abawany 1y ago
- glenstein 1y ago
  >I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises. If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go. Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be. I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
  - gldrk 1y ago
    >The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
    - glenstein 1y ago
      Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
      - gldrk 1y ago
- tracker1 1y ago
  It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago. Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that. I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008. Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up. But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...
shellwizard 1y ago
I wish they would let users fund Firefox development directly and not Mozilla's own agenda
- SG- 1y ago
  how much have you funded?
  - stronglikedan 1y ago
    Why would you think they have funded anything given that they clearly stated they are against funding Mozilla's agenda which is currently the only option?
    - jamespo 1y ago
      Would they otherwise? Unlikely, the internet is a moocher's paradise
      - radlad 1y ago
        Um, if they are asking for an avenue to do so, probably yes? I personally spend hundreds a month on charitable donations - to political advocacy groups, social outreach organizations, and to open-source software that provides me immense value. I think this is one of the most direct ways I can influence the world around me.
        pseudalopex 1y ago
        It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And anyone can give Mozilla Corporation money now by subscribing to their services.
        radlad 1y ago
        I'm not sure this is exclusive to fundraising - the same is said in business about people who will actually purchase a product, versus those that say they will. Regardless, the comment felt unnecessary in context. And for what it's worth - subscribing to services is not really the same. For one thing, it puts a cap on how much I can (reasonably) provide.
slabity 1y ago
Damn, I apparently missed the memo that the backend service for Mozilla Monitor was shady while I used it. Are there any actual services like this that work properly? I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later.
- blakesterz 1y ago
  Wondering the same thing, like is DeleteMe better? Or at least not like this thing?
- sunaookami 1y ago
  >Are there any actual services like this that work properly? No >I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later That's literally their business model. Or it pops up on another site from the same people.
- opteryology 1y ago
  The "respawning" issue slabity mentioned where data vanishes and then pops back up weeks later is the core structural problem of this industry. It’s a game of whack-a-mole: you get removed from Broker A, but they re-ingest your data from a public record scrape or another broker a few months later. That’s why effective removal has to be continuous, not a one-off. However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting. For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.
201984 1y ago
"403 Forbidden" error unfortunately.
Steve-Tony 1y ago
[flagged]
- mossTechnician 1y ago
  Mozilla said[0] they would end their partnership with OneRep back in March 2024. In February 2025, Brian Krebs discovered[1] they were still using the service. Maybe the relationship will end this time. [0]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-after-ceo-admits-to-running-people-search-networks/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft... [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/nearly-a-year-later-mozilla-is-still-promoting-onerep/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/nearly-a-year-later-mozi...
ugh123 1y ago
> Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services How in the world was this not considered fraud, or in the very least - breach of contract?
- x0x0 1y ago
  those are, for better or worse, legal businesses. breach of contract: unless it was in the contract that he warranted that he didn't/wouldn't do this, it's not a breach of contract? It does showcase extremely poor due diligence from Mozilla.
ovo101 1y ago
Glad Mozilla finally ended the Onerep partnership—too much conflict of interest in the data broker world.
knowitnone3 1y ago
typical of Mozilla to collude with data brokers. They've been selling their soul it for years. Google, Perplexity, Amazon, Bing, etc.
jokoon 1y ago
There is an annoying bug in firefox where user/pass autofill doesn't work for some websites, like reddit or others. Still not fixed
mossTechnician 1y ago
Mozilla says they have "high standards for vendors" in their latest statement, but why didn't those standards apply back when they were told about this in March 2024? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...
blibble 1y ago
just seemed obvious to me that someone asking for all your personal information so they can "help delete it" is probably crooked how do mozilla keep being fooled by these things?
_zagj 1y ago
> In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was continuing to operate at least one of them. Sixteen months later, however, Mozilla is still promoting Onerep. This week, Mozilla announced its partnership with Onerep will officially end next month. Why would anyone give Mozilla any money after this, even for a product that wasn't privacy-oriented (like a VPN)? Also: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-company-onerep-com-founded-dozens-of-people-search-firms/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-comp... > But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-shelest https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-shelest > McLean, Virginia, United States An immigrant who makes money aggregating and selling Americans' personal information. Is there some way he can be deported?
- 2WSSd-JzVM 1y ago
  > An immigrant who makes money aggregating and selling Americans' personal information. Is there some way he can be deported? As in, you don't want a law to make it illegal in general, you only want to ban immigrants from being data brokers?
  - _zagj 1y ago
    As in, obviously this isn't the kind of person we should be allowing to immigrate here.

124 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. > Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1] [1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...

dralley 1y ago
>Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud. This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.
- kgwxd 1y ago
  Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit?
- PunchyHamster 1y ago
  But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ?
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  There are however two options available: * Make the browser development the charitable work, or * accept funding to non-charitable company However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
  - alwa 1y ago
    Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work? From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]: > As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have. Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    - hrimfaxi 1y ago
      Yes. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business-income-tax https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
      - amadeuspagel 1y ago
        > Even though an organization is recognized as tax exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business income. So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year...
    - glenstein 1y ago
      Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.
- icepush 1y ago
  You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - spelk 1y ago
    I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
  - fhd2 1y ago
    Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.
- ehutch79 1y ago
  sell $50 keychains. done.
  - input_sh 1y ago
    The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously). Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/ https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/
abawany 1y ago
it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Thunderbird gets $3 million and search licensing gets between $500-600 million.
  - abawany 1y ago
    In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?
    - glenstein 1y ago
      Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea. Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference. Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement. Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
      - abawany 1y ago
glenstein 1y ago
>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises. If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go. Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be. I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
- gldrk 1y ago
  >The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
  - glenstein 1y ago
    Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
    - gldrk 1y ago
tracker1 1y ago
It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago. Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that. I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008. Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up. But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...

shellwizard 1y ago

I wish they would let users fund Firefox development directly and not Mozilla's own agenda

SG- 1y ago
how much have you funded?
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  Why would you think they have funded anything given that they clearly stated they are against funding Mozilla's agenda which is currently the only option?
  - jamespo 1y ago
    Would they otherwise? Unlikely, the internet is a moocher's paradise
    - radlad 1y ago
      Um, if they are asking for an avenue to do so, probably yes? I personally spend hundreds a month on charitable donations - to political advocacy groups, social outreach organizations, and to open-source software that provides me immense value. I think this is one of the most direct ways I can influence the world around me.
      - pseudalopex 1y ago
        It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And anyone can give Mozilla Corporation money now by subscribing to their services.
        radlad 1y ago
        I'm not sure this is exclusive to fundraising - the same is said in business about people who will actually purchase a product, versus those that say they will. Regardless, the comment felt unnecessary in context. And for what it's worth - subscribing to services is not really the same. For one thing, it puts a cap on how much I can (reasonably) provide.

slabity 1y ago

Damn, I apparently missed the memo that the backend service for Mozilla Monitor was shady while I used it. Are there any actual services like this that work properly? I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later.

blakesterz 1y ago
Wondering the same thing, like is DeleteMe better? Or at least not like this thing?
sunaookami 1y ago
>Are there any actual services like this that work properly? No >I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later That's literally their business model. Or it pops up on another site from the same people.
opteryology 1y ago
The "respawning" issue slabity mentioned where data vanishes and then pops back up weeks later is the core structural problem of this industry. It’s a game of whack-a-mole: you get removed from Broker A, but they re-ingest your data from a public record scrape or another broker a few months later. That’s why effective removal has to be continuous, not a one-off. However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting. For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.

201984 1y ago

"403 Forbidden" error unfortunately.

Steve-Tony 1y ago

[flagged]

mossTechnician 1y ago
Mozilla said[0] they would end their partnership with OneRep back in March 2024. In February 2025, Brian Krebs discovered[1] they were still using the service. Maybe the relationship will end this time. [0]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-after-ceo-admits-to-running-people-search-networks/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft... [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/nearly-a-year-later-mozilla-is-still-promoting-onerep/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/nearly-a-year-later-mozi...

ugh123 1y ago

> Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services How in the world was this not considered fraud, or in the very least - breach of contract?

x0x0 1y ago
those are, for better or worse, legal businesses. breach of contract: unless it was in the contract that he warranted that he didn't/wouldn't do this, it's not a breach of contract? It does showcase extremely poor due diligence from Mozilla.

ovo101 1y ago

Glad Mozilla finally ended the Onerep partnership—too much conflict of interest in the data broker world.

knowitnone3 1y ago

typical of Mozilla to collude with data brokers. They've been selling their soul it for years. Google, Perplexity, Amazon, Bing, etc.

jokoon 1y ago

There is an annoying bug in firefox where user/pass autofill doesn't work for some websites, like reddit or others. Still not fixed

mossTechnician 1y ago

Mozilla says they have "high standards for vendors" in their latest statement, but why didn't those standards apply back when they were told about this in March 2024? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...

blibble 1y ago

just seemed obvious to me that someone asking for all your personal information so they can "help delete it" is probably crooked how do mozilla keep being fooled by these things?

_zagj 1y ago

> In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was continuing to operate at least one of them. Sixteen months later, however, Mozilla is still promoting Onerep. This week, Mozilla announced its partnership with Onerep will officially end next month. Why would anyone give Mozilla any money after this, even for a product that wasn't privacy-oriented (like a VPN)? Also: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-company-onerep-com-founded-dozens-of-people-search-firms/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-comp... > But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-shelest https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-shelest > McLean, Virginia, United States An immigrant who makes money aggregating and selling Americans' personal information. Is there some way he can be deported?

2WSSd-JzVM 1y ago
> An immigrant who makes money aggregating and selling Americans' personal information. Is there some way he can be deported? As in, you don't want a law to make it illegal in general, you only want to ban immigrants from being data brokers?
- _zagj 1y ago
  As in, obviously this isn't the kind of person we should be allowing to immigrate here.