Leaders of the nonprofit that helped launch the Mozilla Firefox web browser more than two decades ago were embarrassed last week after their partner in a new data privacy initiative was revealed to be the founder of multiple websites that sell people’s personal information for profit.
The Mozilla Foundation in San Francisco has since cut ties with that developer. However, leaders have offered little insight into the apparent lapse in vetting their partner in the new identity protection initiative. The Mozilla Corporation, the foundation’s taxable subsidiary that oversees its web browser business, began offering the service in February as a premium add-on to its existing Firefox web browser for $8.99 per month.
The bundled service was offered on a subscription basis with Onerep, a company with a listed address in McLean, Virginia, that markets itself as being “on a mission to make privacy affordable for everyone.” It does so by allegedly monitoring the web for sensitive data related to users’ age, family, credit score, and more and automating removal of the data from more than 190 search engines and websites.
Eyebrows were raised by a cybersecurity expert’s report that Onerep appeared to be operating out of Belarus and Cyprus and that its Belarusian CEO, Dimitry Shelest, had founded dozens of people-search businesses since 2010. Among the businesses is a still-active data broker website, Nuwber, that sells background reports on people.
In a statement to The NonProfit Times, Shelest acknowledged that Onerep was launched in Eastern Europe but said its workforce has been globally distributed across the United States, Europe and Asia for years. He added that he has been living in the United States since early 2022 and said there is zero crossover or information-sharing between Nuwber and Onerep. He defended what appears to be the use of Nuwber and other people-search sites to funnel business to Onerep through advertisements targeted to those requesting removal of their information from such sites. The advertisements are “to let them know that if they were exposed on that site, there may be others, and to bring awareness to there being a more automated opt-out option such as Onerep,” Shelest said via the statement.
“I get it,” Shelest added. “My affiliation with a people-search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people-search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.”
Mozilla executives aren’t convinced. They’ve since released a statement acknowledging the potential if not actual conflict of interest posed by affiliating their identity protection service with an individual who profits from trafficking in sensitive data related to people’s identity. “We are moving away from Onerep as a service provider,” said Brandon Borrman, a Mozilla spokesperson. “Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO do not align with our values. We’re working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first.”
The Mozilla Foundation was launched in 2003 by former employees of Netscape after that company and its now-defunct Netscape Navigator browser were acquired by AOL. Foundation leaders had set out to develop an alternate open-source browser, which they initially codenamed “Phoenix” to symbolize the idea that it was rising from the ashes of Netscape before renaming it Firefox due to a trademark infringement claim.
Use of Firefox has waned considerably since then to a percentage currently estimated between 3% and 8% of internet users worldwide according to various industry studies, well behind industry leader Google Chrome and competitors Microsoft Edge and Safari. However, even at those low numbers, Firefox remains the fourth most popular browser with what are still believed to be 150 million or more users around the globe.
The Mozilla Foundation today has a mission to promote the internet as a public resource open to all and is guided by 10 principles known as the Mozilla Manifesto, one of which holds that “individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.” The foundation is funded by a combination of grants, donations, royalties, and program service fees. Revenue during 2022 was $49.7 million, according to the foundation’s most recently available federal Form 990 filing.
