The amazing boon of the internet comes with some significant perks and drawbacks, and the breach of personal information is undoubtedly the most important of them all. It is genuinely difficult to keep track of the whereabouts of any loss of personal data. Firefox, out of concern for its users, today launched Firefox Monitor, a tool that lets you know if and when your email address or any other e-account has been subjected to a data breach.
The tool was first announced in June, after which it was put to several testing all summer, and emerging with confidence, the company declared its release today.
Mozilla partnered with Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned, an online database of accountable data breaches, to develop this free service. Firefox Monitor is thus, almost an identical twin of HIBP. The banner of Mozilla and Firefox install base are like to broaden its reach, although the function performed is no different.
Once you visit monitor.firefox.com and enter your email address, it will be scanned against the HIBP database to notify you whether your ID has been involved in any publicly known past data breach. This is helpful because once you know exactly where your security has been compromised, you can alter your password to prevent further data loss. Also worth mentioning is that Firefox Monitor isn’t only accessible from Firefox but from any browser since it’s a webpage.
Firefox Monitor, as noted from the Mozilla blog, is only a stepping stone on its way to realizing a safer internet experience for the users. There has been a recent announcement about Mozilla’s road-map to anti-tracking, which exposes any third-party tracker that follows you around the internet. There’s also the idea of launching a password management tool called Firefox Lockbox, enabling users to store and auto-complete usernames and passwords for websites they’ve already visited.
