Mozilla Monitor Plus

I say Mozilla, you say Firefox, right? But in fact, Mozilla’s stable of apps goes way beyond the browser. The free Mozilla Monitor (formerly Firefox Monitor) has kept its users apprised of data breaches since 2018. With its evolution into Mozilla Monitor Plus, the service extends its coverage to removing your personal data from people search and data broker sites. Its annual subscription price is lower than that of Optery or Privacy Bee, but those two remain our Editors’ Choice winners in this realm because they do more to protect your privacy.

How Much Does Mozilla Monitor Plus Cost?

You can subscribe to Mozilla Monitor Plus for $13.99 per month. If you subscribe on a yearly basis, the monthly price drops to $8.99, for a total of $107.88 per year. Surfshark Incogni undercuts that price, charging just $77.88 for a year’s subscription, but most similar services cost more.

With Abine DeleteMe, you pay $129 per year, $229 to cover you and a partner, or $329 for a family of five. Mozilla doesn’t offer a similar family plan.

At $179.88 and $197 per year, respectively, Kanary and Privacy Bee charge more than Mozilla. They also cover more data brokers (Kanary by a little and Privacy Bee by a lot) and offer more features. Both let you manage personal data for family members. For multi-person subscriptions, Kanary discounts each person by $23; Privacy Bee doesn’t discount additional family members.

It’s a bit harder to pin down Optery’s price. For fully automated personal data removal, you pay $249 for the Ultimate tier. However, Optery also lets you pay less in exchange for taking on some removals yourself. Its lowest Core tier costs just $39 per year, but you only get automation for a third of the sites, along with other limitations. Family plans with Optery drop the price from 20% to 30% depending on the number of individuals covered.

IDX Complete seems to be the most expensive, charging $355.32 per year. However, with this product, personal data removal is just one among a feature set that also includes password management, a VPN, and full-blown identity theft remediation. Aura, too, includes personal data removal along with a suite of other privacy features, antivirus protection, password management, identity theft remediation, and more. At $144 per year, Aura is among the less expensive solutions.

Like DeleteMe, Kanary, Optery, and Privacy Bee, Mozilla lets you run a scan and view where your data resides at no charge. But where the others offer detailed, step-by-step removal instructions tailored to each site, Mozilla just points you at your data, leaving you on your own to figure out the removal process. That makes Mozilla’s free scan a lot less useful.

Getting Started With Mozilla Monitor for Free

Running a free scan for exposed data is a snap with Mozilla. Just visit its website, enter your email, and click for a free scan. You do have to create an account with a password to protect your data. You also must supply an emailed confirmation code to prove you own the email account you’re checking.

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To proceed with the scan, you enter your birth date along with your first name, last name, and the city and state of your residence. Be careful entering this data. While you can add up to five email addresses for scanning, you can’t change the name or address data after initial registration. That’s quite unusual. Most similar services not only let you make changes as needed but also include the option to add multiple addresses and phone numbers, alternate names such as nicknames, and more.

The scan runs quickly and checks for your personal info in 744 known data breaches (using data supplied by HaveIBeenPwned). Privacy Bee checks for data breach exposures as well. Both IDX Complete and Aura monitor data breaches as part of their full-scale identity theft remediation services.

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It also checks 190 data broker sites. When I ran the test myself, it found 27 exposures in 11 data breaches but zero hits in the data brokers list. That’s understandable, as other similar services in recent reviews wiped out my footprint. In any case, the free scan just points out profiles on broker sites without automating removal or offering site-specific DIY removal instructions.

I clicked Fix All Exposures, which walked me through the data breaches. This list included some ancient breaches, going all the way back to 2013. Everything it listed proved to be something I had already fixed. This won’t be the case for most users. You need to go down the list and, where possible, change your password for the breached site. As you take care of each reported breach, you click to dismiss it from the list.

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The last cleanup step involves three of what Mozilla calls security recommendations and what I call shameless plugs. The service recommends protecting your phone number with Firefox Relay Phone Mask, hiding your true email with Firefox Relay Email Mask, and installing Mozilla VPN. Firefox Relay costs another $11.88 per year for email protection or $47.88 with phone masking. A yearly subscription for the VPN costs $59.88. These costs are adding up for what’s nominally a free service.

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Upgrading to Mozilla Monitor Plus

Even if you plan to pay for the automated personal data cleanup supplied by the Plus edition, you should start by signing up for a free account. That way, you can preview just how badly your data is exposed. Presuming there’s plenty to clean up, you can choose either a month’s subscription or a full year. The service also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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As noted, my recent testing of other similar services left me with zero brokers found by Mozilla. To get another view of the situation, I enlisted the aid of my colleague Michael Muchmore. His scan results were more in line with what I’d expect—over 800 exposed personal data items on more than 100 data broker sites.

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Mozilla immediately got to work on opting out from these data aggregators, marking them all as “In progress.” Endlessly optimistic, it reported his security exposures as “all fixed,” meaning that it had at least initiated all the removal processes. A perusal of the FAQs revealed that most removals take 7–14 days. If 90 days elapse without successful profile removal, Mozilla notifies the user to manually dig in and opt out.

Overnight, the service reported a big success, with 19 items fixed. A closer look revealed this meant cleanup from exactly one data broker, a profile that contained 19 distinct items of personal data. Another four days brought another five broker opt-outs to completion, eliminating over 300 individual exposures. Having observed the process ramping up, I chose not to wait the full 7–14 days for the rest. Looking farther down the timeline, Mozilla repeats its scan every month and, as noted, warns you if the removal process doesn’t finish within 90 days.

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Who Handles the Most Data Aggregator Sites?

Each personal data removal service defines its own list of search sites and data brokers, and the overlap between these lists varies quite a bit. The fact that I recently tested another such service wouldn’t necessarily wipe my profile from every site tracked by Mozilla, except that the review in question was Privacy Bee, which covers more sites than any competitors. A quick check suggests that almost all sites listed by other services are also found on Privacy Bee’s list.

At present, Privacy Bee performs automatic removals on 434 distinct sites. Next in line is Optery, which handles 305 sites for Ultimate tier subscribers. As noted, Mozilla tracks 190 sites, a little above Incogni’s 183 and slightly below Kanary’s 210. Mozilla’s support website lists all 190 sites.

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The numbers decline from here. As noted, data removal is just one feature of IDX Complete, which removes your data from 137 sites. The venerable DeleteMe hasn’t caught up with the big lists that newer competitors boast—it’s stuck at six dozen. Aura, with just 28 sites covered, is at the bottom.

There’s always the possibility that you’ll find your data on a site your service doesn’t handle. With some services, you can submit a custom request to remove your data from such brokers or remove it from a company you no longer trust to keep your data safe. Privacy Bee handles such requests for over 16,000 companies, and DeleteMe manages about 700. Optery will attempt custom removal from any site, though success isn’t promised. As for Mozilla, it doesn’t support custom removals at present.

What Keeps My Data Safe?

If you want a service to find and remove your personal data from aggregator sites, you must tell it what data you want removed. Now, you’re relying on the service to keep that data safe. As always, you should use a strong, unique password to protect your account. Well, unless you use Privacy Bee, which skips the password, instead sending a code to your account email each time you want to log in. Privacy Bee relies on the security of your email account, which isn’t unreasonable since a compromised email account would put you in a world of trouble.

Relying on nothing but a password for authentication is risky since anyone who steals or guesses your password can access the account. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) ensures that simply knowing the password isn’t enough to compromise your security.

You can’t separately add MFA to your Monitor Plus account, but you can apply it to your overall Mozilla account. Specifically, you can require the use of Google Authenticator or a compatible authenticator app in addition to your password. DeleteMe, IDX Complete, Kanary, and Optery support this type of MFA. With DeleteMe, you can opt to receive a code at your primary email address instead.

Decent Data Removal

Monitor Plus is a good effort on Mozilla’s part and seems to do what it promises, but it comes up short in some places. Where competitors offer detailed DIY removal steps to supplement their free scan, Mozilla leaves it to you to figure out the process and its limited set of personal data for checking can’t be edited after registration. Consider Mozilla if you want a big-name company handling your personal data cleanup. But also consider our Editors’ Choice winners, Privacy Bee and Optery. Privacy Bee seriously expands privacy protection beyond data cleanup, and Optery provides detailed and transparent data removal and the flexibility to balance cost against DIY cleanup work.