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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

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Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#61

Post by gregknicholson »

hackcasual wrote: post #24
davidgerard wrote: post #7

Brendan Eich answers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680 basically he plans to keep it working the way it works now, "opt out" and all - he's confident this is a completely legal way to work

> I realize some don’t like it, agree we should respect their wishes. But the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists and is not illegal or unethical. Nominative fair use of public data also legal. There's a huge difference between sending someone money without their prior permission and creating a system to solicit money to send to someone without their prior permi…

> the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists

Surely the recipient has to create a PayPal or Western Union account first, which constitutes giving permission for that company to take payment on their behalf.

And in fairness, the complaint isn't even that money is being sent to people without their consent. The problem is that the money isn't actually being sent to those people at all — Brave are keeping it.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#62

Post by matt4077 »

davidgerard wrote: post #32
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #31

Brave is a web browser that takes your money and claims to pay out to your favorite websites and content creators, but in most cases actually pays into a "user growth pool" that funds pyramid-shaped marketing (paying users to use the browser) and referral programs for partner content creators. How is that not fraud?

> How is that not fraud? The answer appears to be "technically", and "sue if you think you're big enough".

Fraud is a criminal offense. It needs a prosecutor, not a plaintiff.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#63

Post by egypturnash »

egypturnash wrote: post #42

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess. According to https://brave.com/publishers/ - once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site. - you have to “check your balance frequently and…

Oh apparently they understand Twitch channels too, huzzah, ugh.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#64

Post by egypturnash »

duxup wrote: post #50
egypturnash wrote: post #42

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess. According to https://brave.com/publishers/ - once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site. - you have to “check your balance frequently and…

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

Yeah I suspect this is part of their overall revenue model.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#65

Post by subway »

beering wrote: post #37
woolvalley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox runs worse than chrome still, and it doesn't work well at all on my 2 core 2015 macbook pro. It works fine on my 6 core & 4 core machines although. I would also like something like the easy user switching that chrome has, since once user would have one set of session tab logins (twitter, fb, google, etc), and another user would have another. firefox -no-remote isn't that smooth of an experience compared to ch…

The Containers add-on[0] for Firefox that Mozilla makes has satisfied my need for partitioning. It's on a per-tab basis and also lets you define certain domains to automatically open in a specific container (e.g. Jira always opens in my Work container). I can't really speak to Firefox's performance issues though. I feel like they're just as good on rendering and JS speed, but the overall UI doesn't have the same "fas…

Every time the containers add-on gets updated, it forgets all your preferences.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#66

Post by Fuebxien »

gregknicholson wrote: post #61
hackcasual wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I realize some don’t like it, agree we should respect their wishes. But the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists and is not illegal or unethical. Nominative fair use of public data also legal. There's a huge difference between sending someone money without their prior permission and creating a system to solicit money to send to someone without their prior permi…

> the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists Surely the recipient has to create a PayPal or Western Union account first, which constitutes giving permission for that company to take payment on their behalf. And in fairness, the complaint isn't even that money is being sent to people without their consent. The problem is that the money isn't actually being sent to t…

That's not how Western Union works. The recipient goes to WU and presents matching ID.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#67

Post by matt4077 »

“Brave” is just a blatant protection racket, trying to strongarm people that want nothing to do with him into contracts dictated by Eich.

On the user-facing side, he’s replacing ads with his own, like a cheap motel WiFi. If you trust this blatant power- and money-grab with your privacy just because you see common cause with his mission to see traditional journalism die, I won’t shed a tear when we find out he’s selling clickstreams to the highest bidder.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#68

Post by staticassertion »

duxup wrote: post #50
egypturnash wrote: post #42

I just dug up info on how Brave’s contributions thing works and it feels like such a mess. According to https://brave.com/publishers/ - once you have accumulated $100 in contributions they email “the webmaster at your site” and the owner of your domain according to the WHOIS. I assume this is “webmaster@domain.name”, which I sure don’t have set up on my personal site. - you have to “check your balance frequently and…

That sounds so clumsy that I suspect they really don't care / want folks to fail to collect.

I think people may be forgetting that Brave is a very small, new company, and not everything is streamlined yet...

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#69

Post by icebraining »

ShannonAlther wrote: post #33
davidgerard wrote: post #7

Brendan Eich answers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680 basically he plans to keep it working the way it works now, "opt out" and all - he's confident this is a completely legal way to work

Just realized I didn't know this: how are you supposed to comply with GDPR if your clients are partially anonymous?

I assume you're talking about the user requests regarding their data? Well, if the data is so anonymized that even the person can't prove who they are, then I'd say it falls in the provision that exempts anonymized data.

But in this case, I'm assuming the user must have a private key (for signing BAT transactions), so they could build a feature in the browser to sign messages using it.

Re: Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

#70

Post by detaro »

russdpale wrote: post #51

I don't totally understand what his problem is. He doesn't want to take money that people are trying to give him? What is the problem here exactly? If he doesn't want it, why not just donate it or something? It's not like the browser is setting up a crowd funding page for you.. it just lets you know you can pay your favorite content creators how you want instead of a huge unfair chunk going to google. And for the rec…

> It's not like the browser is setting up a crowd funding page for you

Isn't it pretty much like this? How many people would use some other way of giving a creator money if they knew that the creator isn't actually signed up for Brave's thing and they're creating additional work for them, or that the money might even be distributed to others at some point?

EDIT: some screenshots: https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808 - zero indication that's not going directly to the creator

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