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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

#131

Post by MattGrommes »

brandnewlow wrote: post #89
egypturnash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

Even if Brave has the best interests of everyone at heart, this kind of thing has been tried many times and nobody is ever happy with it.

If the person doesn't want to make money from their fans, that's their choice and it's not cool to possibly mislead fans into thinking the person is taking their money.

It's a pain for people to have to constantly monitor all the random sites collecting money "for them". New services are popping up all the time, how are people supposed to keep track? No, Brave is not going to be able to find the correct way of contacting everyone.

If your service is great, why not make it opt-in and advertise it? Patreon succeeds because people want to sign up and make money from it when they're ready to do that. I believe you're all trying to do their right thing and not take anybody's money fraudulently but this isn't the right thing.

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

#132

Post by notahacker »

staticassertion wrote: post #68
duxup wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't think being a startup justifies switching on the "deduct money from my account to pay these entities" button before you've figured out how and if you can actually pay them.

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

#133

Post by rchaud »

brandnewlow wrote: post #99
plusCubed wrote: post #2

Edit: title was changed, I am not Tom Scott I am not too familiar with how Brave and BAT (Brave Attention Token), so please chime in. Here's how Brave describes the BAT YouTube donations system: https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attentio... From my understanding, users of the Brave Browser select which YouTubers to donate to, but they don't know whether the channels have opted in to receive donation…

I work at Brave. Tips to un-verified publishers sit in escrow for the creator to claim. IANAL but GDPR refers to personal data collected from users. The only "Youtuber data" being "used" here is publicly gettable data from the Youtuber's channel.

Tom Scott did not explicitly sign up for this service. Brave is not even telling users that Tom Scott is not signed up, and Brave has no automated way of contacting him to let him know that someone donated. The system is engineered to move the money towards Brave, with neither the benefactor nor the beneficiary being aware of that. How is that ethical?

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

#134

Post by egypturnash »

brandnewlow wrote: post #89
egypturnash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

Basically it feels like you are saying "we will take donations for you but tell you we are getting them in the most obscure ways possible, and we will certainly not make it easy for you to claim them".

Or to couch it in the form of a GenX nerd reference: if you're taking donations in my name, you're telling me about them by putting a note to that effect in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Realistically, I would say it'd look a lot less suspicious if you stopped taking donations for people until they have actually opted in. I'm on Patreon because one of my fans said "hey I really wanna start giving you money for your comics, would you set up a Patreon?", not because Patreon found my stuff and set up a tip jar for me.

Also automate the payouts, if I have ads on my stuff then I get money every so often as long as I've accumulated more than the minimum payout, but I have to remember to go check with Brave? Come on, it can't be more than a couple day's hacking to give a creator the option to say "pay me every month if I'm above $minimum_payout". (And if this is a thing you can now set up to happen regularly, there are webpages that need to be updated to reflect this.)

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

#135

Post by notahacker »

brandnewlow wrote: post #89
egypturnash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

You invite users to donate to regularly purchase your cryptoassets whilst designing a dark pattern UX which indicates the cryptoassets are being distributed in a certain ratio amongst YouTubers and other content creators. Your website also falsely claims to be sending these assets to these content creators once a month and falsely claims that browser users can see how the assets have been distributed using this UX. In fact, only a small portion of the assets are actually distributed, and the browser user has no way of knowing whether their intended recipients receive anything.

Your investors are rewarded by the cryptoasset price rising from more people buying the tokens than selling them.

Do you honestly not see the problem here?

And that's even before we get into the TOC which explicitly permit you to confiscate funds not claimed within 90 days for growth marketing use....

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

#136

Post by CryptoPunk »

AnabeeKnox wrote: post #108
brandnewlow wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Brave. Tips to un-verified publishers sit in escrow for the creator to claim. IANAL but GDPR refers to personal data collected from users. The only "Youtuber data" being "used" here is publicly gettable data from the Youtuber's channel.

Search on this page for the word "fraud". Here's what I'd do in your position: remove anything on the internet which personally identifies you as an employee of your company. Nobody knows what is going to happen next, but be prepared for it.

There is zero chance an employee is going to get in trouble because a browser company they worked for collected funds in an escrow account to be released in the event that an intended recipient signs up.

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

#137

Post by egypturnash »

smsm42 wrote: post #119
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…

> makes it sound like they understand YouTube accounts and nothing else The text on the page - as I see it now - says "Do you run a web site or are you a YouTube creator". I think that doesn't say "YouTube accounts and nothing else", since it explicitly mentions "web site" before Youtube.

That's after a paragraph where I listed like five large sites with tons of users on them.

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

#138

Post by sixhobbits »

brandnewlow wrote: post #89
egypturnash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

This almost sounds like something that belongs on /r/fellowkids. Combined with the description in your profile with the whole "I'm on HN to learn from people out there in the trenches" line makes it all come across very badly IMO. (Written from mobile Brave and love the built in script and ad-blocking, but I honestly think you'd be better off addressing some of the concerns here rather than sidling up and saying "hey I'm one of you"

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

#139

Post by detaro »

oh_sigh wrote: post #125
brandnewlow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why do you suspect that? (I work at Brave. We're all very, very nerdy here. It'd be helpful to understand why a fellow nerd suspects we're up to no good.)

Do you return the donations to the donor if they are not accepted by the recipient in some period of time? Like, after a year or something?

No, since they anonymize the flow and thus do not know where the money came from. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076198964607610880

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

#140

Post by subway »

bichiliad wrote: post #103
subway wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been using containers for some time now (probably since not long after it was announced) to keep my twitter accounts separate, and I've never had to reset or update my preferences.

On at least 3 separate occasions now I've gone to open a container tab, and found that I was back to the default set of (Work, Personal, Shopping, I think). Even better is when this happens, it also resets the count on how many container tabs you've opened, so near the end of the day I'll go to shift containers and get blocked by a "Congrats! You've opened 100 container tabs!" that needs to be dismissed.
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