Your personal data is yours – and it should remain yours! Unfortunately data breaches that reveal your personal information on the internet are omnipresent these days. In fact, fraudulent use of stolen credentials is the 2nd-most common threat action (after phishing) in Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations report and highlights the problematic situation of data breaches.

In 2018, we launched Firefox Monitor which instantly notifies you in case your data was involved in a breach and further provides guidance on how to protect your personal information online. Expanding the scope of protecting our users across the world to stay in control of their data and privacy, we integrated alerts from Firefox Monitor into mainstream Firefox. We integrated this privacy enhancing feature into your daily browsing experience so Firefox can better protect your data by instantly notifying you when you visit a site that has been breached.

While sites continue to suffer password breaches, other leaks or lose other types of data. Even though we consider all personal data as important, notifying you for every one of these leaks generates noise that’s difficult to act on. The better alternative is to only alert you in case it’s critical for you to act to protect your data. Hence, the primary change is that Firefox will only show alerts for websites where passwords were exposed in the breach.

In detail, we are announcing an update to our initial Firefox breach alert policy for when Firefox alerts for breached sites:

“Firefox shows a breach alert when a user visits a site where passwords were exposed and added to Have I Been Pwned within the last 2 months.”

To receive the most comprehensive breach alerts we suggest to sign up for Firefox Monitor to check if your account was involved in a breach. We will keep you informed and will alert you with an email in case your personal data is affected by a data breach. Our continued commitment  to protect your privacy and security from online threats is critical for us and aligns with our mission: Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

If you are a Firefox user, you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this new privacy protection. If you aren’t a Firefox user, download Firefox to start benefiting from all the ways that Firefox works to protect your privacy.