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.

  • Daughter3546@lemmy.worldOP
    23·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        91·
        1 year ago

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

        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.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            4·
            1 year ago

            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.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                2·
                1 year 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@lemmy.worldOP
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.