this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
54 points (96.6% liked)

Privacy

33268 readers
532 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I use the built-in sync service in various Firefox forks to sync bookmarks/history/tabs, using the default Mozilla servers.

When I went to "Manage Account" to review and prune the devices ("services?") linked with Mozilla Sync down to what I'm actively using currently, and noticed "Mozilla Monitor" in there.

I can't find any info on why Mozilla Monitor required sync credentials, and I don't remember Mozilla Monitor telling me it would be gaining access to my sync data, nor can I find any way to review what data "Mozilla Monitor" has access to.

Any ideas?

For now I'm signing out that entry, while I consider other sync options.

Edit: changed title from 'Mozilla/Firefox sync - why is "Mozilla Monitor" a signed in device?'

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Monitor monitors the web for leaked credentials you have in Firefox's password manager. That's what it's for. I think it's quite clear why it would access your sync data

[–] nyankas@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It‘s also worth mentioning that Monitor anonymizes your data before checking it for breaches.

So there shouldn‘t be any serious privacy issues.

[–] tavu@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yes, I was aware of that at the time, and I probably assumed that my browser would be hashing each piece of data (e.g. each email address or username) before sending it to Mozilla Monitor or haveibeenpwned.

What concerns me is Mozilla Monitor appearing in the list of devices/browsers synced, each of which is implied to have cleartext access to all the data I decide to sync (bookmarks/history/tabs in my case, logins+passwords and more for many other people).

[–] tavu@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I've seen no documentation that Mozilla Monitor works by accessing one's sync data.

The interface suggests that it only monitors email addresses manually added on monitor.mozilla.org's UI.