In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service
Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published,
Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the
Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users.
Mozilla offers Onerep to Firefox users on a subscription basis as part of
Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name
Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website
Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.
The ink on that partnership agreement had barely dried before KrebsOnSecurity
published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder
Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called
Nuwber that sells background reports on people. This seemed to contradict Onerep’s stated motto, “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”
