Mozilla has terminated its cooperation with Onerep, a service for removing private data from people search sites, when it became known that the company’s director had created such sites himself

Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox web browser, has terminated its cooperation with Onerep, a service that protects users’ personal data. This decision was made after it became known that Onerep’s CEO and founder, Belarusian Dimitry Shelest, was involved in the creation of numerous websites that allowed searching for people’s personal data, which became known after an investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.

Introduced as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus, Onerep was designed to help users remove their information from hundreds of personal data sites that distribute personal information for people search. However, the service’s reliability was called into question when KrebsOnSecurity published a report on March 14 that revealed that since 2010, Shelest has launched several people search services, including Nuwber, a data broker that sells biographical reports.

In response to the accusations, on March 21, Shelest issued a statement acknowledging his stake in Nuwber and claiming that there was no exchange of information between Nuwber and Onerep. Despite this statement, Mozilla decided to distance itself from Onerep, calling the company’s CEO’s financial interests and activities inconsistent with its values.

“Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO do not align with our values,” Mozilla wrote. “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.”

KrebsOnSecurity’s investigation also revealed that Shelest’s email address was used around 2010 by an affiliate of the Russian-language organization Spamit, which paid people to aggressively promote websites advertising male enhancement drugs and generic pharmaceuticals. This connection was also confirmed by research by several graduate students at George Mason University.