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Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to try this, but it seems to be restricted to only people in the USA. It is impossible to enter a location outside the USA in the sign-up form, and it's impossible to skip that form. Please, Mozilla, make it much clearer which countries are supported to avoid causing this frustration and to give people a reason to come back once other countries are supported.

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Sorry about that. The form should only be shown for people in the USA, but detecting the country you're in can't be done perfectly. Which is a good reminder - we'll look into making the US-only part clearer.

(I'm an engineer on Monitor.)

Or perhaps, just thinking out loud, you could extend support for the service to other countries. The EU would love you for this at the very least.

I'm sure if it was as easy as snapping their fingers, they'd have done it.

Time is a finite resource, and a lot of these data brokers seem to be very geographically-specific and have their own ways of requesting deletion.

I am from the EU, so tell me about it :) But yes, the sibling comment is right: this isn't something you can expand to other countries with the push of a button.

Personally, for this specific functionality, I don't think the EU wouldn't be at the top of the list though: these types data brokers are way more of a problem in other countries. We have laws like GDPR :)

I'm also not clear why this is US only. There's definitely a market in other areas of the world. I'd be interested to know why it should be US only.

They're likely starting with the US because either their partner(s) for this is US only and/or it's easier to start with a single large market. The US is about a 50% larger market in terms of GDP than all EU countries combined.

That is correct, and it's way more of a problem in the US (but also e.g. in Brazil).

Also: are you the JohnTHaller of PortableApps fame? If so: thanks for making my high school computer usage bearable, way back when!

I am indeed! Still supporting and growing it. You're welcome!

What’s wrong with simply displaying/linking to a list of supported countries?

The "list" is:

- USA

It is listed in places, but clearly not explicitly enough in the right places.

Same with Optery shared below. I wonder if there are any European/International counterparts to these services.

Could just be in the short term they are limiting it to the USA and going global soon.

haveibeenpwned.com has been offering the same service for free for years.

It doesn't look the same to me.

haveibeenpwned will notify you if your email address was in a breach.

The Mozilla offering seems to include the same, but also cover other pieces of personal data, and the ability to request removal from data brokers.

That ability is not the product they're offering though, that's something you can already once you identify where your data is. And obviously that's if they have a way for you to do request removal and if they feel like doing it at all which are the same constraints for Mozilla. I think this is all purely for convenience of having it all done for you (which is okay)

Well, even if you consider the removal aspect of it useless since you could do it yourself, there is still value in knowing where your data is. Have I Been Pwned will tell you about breaches, but not about brokers reselling your data, and they only monitor email addresses.

And yes, you could probably go and ask the brokers directly, but that is certainly a lot of time and effort, so paying for it might make sense, assuming you trust the service provider.

That is correct, and we do help you identify where your data is for free. Many people unfortunately have their data exposed in lots of places,in which case manual removal is a PITA, and that's where the Plus plan comes in.

That is correct, with the additional note that Monitor has also existed for a while providing that functionality for free (in collaboration with HIBP), and will continue to do so for free, and worldwide.

The new thing is scanning for your info at data brokers (for free, but USA-only), and automatically removing them and continuously checking that they stay removed (paid, US only).

haveibeenpwned.com provides data breach monitoring, but does not remove personal info from data broker sites as Optery and Mozilla Monitor do.

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