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Brave’s use of direct mailers

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Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#131

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

twipes wrote: post #121
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought everyone knew by now that paper recycling is a scam? It doesn’t happen. Not cost effective.

As someone who works in the recycling industry (toilet paper & wet wipes). That's just not true for paper. It it plastic that is hardly recycled... Wood pulp and recycled pulp are both in incredibly high demand at the moment and both incredibly cheap to use. I can't speak for global stats, but here in England, as of 2018, we were importing over $600 million of just recycled paper to use from abroad! [ https://www.sta…

I thought paper had to be clean to be recycled, causing a lot of it to be discarded (like used pizza boxes). TIL, thank you.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#132

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

dangrossman wrote: post #129
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought everyone knew by now that paper recycling is a scam? It doesn’t happen. Not cost effective.

64.7% of the paper you put in the recycling bin is indeed recycled.

Used pizza boxes?

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#133

Post by dangrossman »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #132
dangrossman wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

64.7% of the paper you put in the recycling bin is indeed recycled.

Used pizza boxes?

Yes, those too. According to the American Forest & Paper Association, pizza boxes are almost universally accepted by cardboard recyclers. The small amount of cheese and grease in the cardboard bails they buy from recycling programs do not impact the quality of the paper and cardboard manufactured at mills that use recycled inputs.

> AF&PA and Industry Partners Aim to Set the Record Straight – Pizza Boxes Are Recyclable, Grease and Cheese Not an Issue

https://www.afandpa.org/news/2020/afpa-and-industry-partners...

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#134

Post by freediver »

ozten wrote: post #99

I don't envy the job of Brave marketers. Brave's "champion customers" are often people that hate any form of marketing, so every experiment risks alienating these key early adopters.

Hm, what would motivate people who hate any form of marketing to use a browser that mainly depends on ads for revenue?

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#135

Post by jonathansampson »

gtvwill wrote: post #66
longrod wrote: post #13

This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? The scenario is something like this: Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave. Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data. Random person: how did you get my address then right aft…

Lol the problem here is assuming privacy is one of braves main strengths or even goals. When it's not lol. Brave makes money off tracking you and exposing your data, not in keeping it private.

I work at Brave. We don't track you, or expose any data (we don't even have your data to begin with). Reputable researchers have found Brave to exist in a class of its own as the "most private" popular browser tested: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#136

Post by jonathansampson »

igetspam wrote: post #21
longrod wrote: post #13

This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? The scenario is something like this: Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave. Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data. Random person: how did you get my address then right aft…

I got one of these yesterday. I'm uninstalling Brave and going back to Firefox

Firefox, by default and out of the box, sends your keystrokes to Google. Brave asked the USPS to deliver a printed JPEG to people who live within your Zip Code (and you happened to get one as well). These two things are quite different in terms of privacy, security, and trust.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#137

Post by jonathansampson »

paulgb wrote: post #3

It seems like a weird mia culpa. If I’m understanding right, they’re not sorry for sending the mailers, or working with a data broker to get the addresses, just for the fact that names were printed on the envelopes? I wonder who is concerned about the last one that isn’t more concerned about the first two.

I work at Brave. We don't get addresses; we don't want that type of data (we don't want any of your data). The addresses are printed after Brave's QA process has completed. We asked that names NOT be printed on the mailers, but have no way to verify that they were excluded, since that would expose sensitive user data to us (which we do not want). We didn't work with any data broker; we simply provided mailers and desired zip codes (for 7 cities) via the EDDM service.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#138

Post by jonathansampson »

wzdd wrote: post #125
paulgb wrote: post #3

It seems like a weird mia culpa. If I’m understanding right, they’re not sorry for sending the mailers, or working with a data broker to get the addresses, just for the fact that names were printed on the envelopes? I wonder who is concerned about the last one that isn’t more concerned about the first two.

Even if we accept that it's just about the names, it's a weird mea culpa. Obviously they knew the names, because they accidentally printed them. So what they're apologising for is making it so obvious that they knew the names, or, to put it another way, they're apologising for failing to provide the illusion of anonymity to people who were not anonymous at all. For a privacy-focused browser, that is definitely odd.

Brave didn't do the printing; that is (and has been since 2020) handled by the EDDM vendor. Brave doesn't want any user data; we prefer that information to stay with the United States Postal Service, which has legitimate claim over such information.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#139

Post by jonathansampson »

drusepth wrote: post #47
password4321 wrote: post #11

I like Brave. But they always seem to be "asking forgiveness rather than permission".

Not the best vibe from a company whose livelihood is dependent on convincing more and more people to trust them with more and more data.

Brave doesn't ask you to trust it with more and more data; we explicitly do not want any of your data. This issue did not impact user data or privacy in any way either.

Re: Brave’s use of direct mailers

#140

Post by jonathansampson »

nvrspyx wrote: post #128
gruez wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that EDDM is an official offering from USPS, and that USPS is a government agency, it's reasonable to conclude that this activity is state sanctioned. In that case what permission do they need to ask for?

USPS EDDM requires that you only put the area information (city, state, and zip code) and the EDDM label. The fact that this included actual addresses, much less names, is off. The only actual addresses that should be included are Do Not Deliver addresses. Something is fishy here. This doesn't seem to actually be through EDDM, but through some mailer vendor.

It's EDDM, and previous mailers lacked printed names. Our request to exclude printed names, while honored in the past, was not honored with a recent batch. Rather than brushing this off, we chose instead to investigate where the break-down in communication occurred, and share our findings in the blog post. Thankfully, this issue has no impact on user-data, privacy, or security. But it is definitely frustrating for us when we expect names to NOT be printed, only to learn that a batch of mailers contained them after all.
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