141–150 of 172 posts
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That sounds like an unhealthy paranoia. Which seems more likely? The USPS is delivering spam mail against the wishes of the recipient (I still get spam mail weekly despite opting out) or a privacy-focused company is snooping on your devices to steal your personal info (so they can send you mailers?).
> or a privacy-focused company is snooping on your devices to steal your personal info (so they can send you mailers?) I never said that. I don't want Brave on my devices due to their past bad behavior: lying, stealing money from creators in their affiliate program, redirecting legitimate links to shady crypto sites, running a crypto pyramid scheme, and so on. This is just the latest in a long list of reasons not to…
"Stealing money from creators" is quite misleading. When Brave held its token sale in 2017, we allocated 300M tokens to the User Growth Pool. Shortly thereafter we began staking Brave users with tokens to identify creators for whom they would like to offer support. Brave's UI showed a check-mark for verified creators, and nothing for unverified creators (we naively followed the Twitter model).
Some users took the BAT they received from Brave, and attempted to tip it to unverified creators (which landed those tokens in an omnibus settlement wallet). The UI/UX caused a great deal of confusion towards the end of 2018, leading to monumental feedback from several content creators, including Tom Scott of YouTube. Tom's insights gave us the direction we needed to overhaul the Rewards (called 'Payments' at the time) system in major ways. Ultimately, Tom approved of the changes. But note, no money was ever stolen from any creator. Additional details are provided in our 2018 blog post at https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
It was also never the case that Brave was "redirecting legitimate links to shady crypto sites," either. You're referring to our Partner and Affiliate Links in Suggested Sites. That is, if you typed "bitcoin" into the address bar, prior to any network activity, Brave could list (among other options) an affiliate link to binance.us. The user could then decide to visit the bitcoin-related property using Brave's affiliate link, or disregard the suggestion entirely. This feature is off by default in Brave today, but you can read more about it on our blog at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
Wait what? I'm really confused about what was going on here, what was the nature of the alleged mistake, and why it was a mistake or bad.
Brave used an official USPS mass market program to distribute mailers. The USPS allows these mailers to be mailed to every address (by route) in a zip code. The USPS also allows you to filter by such things as "age, household size, and income" (again the route is the granular level), but there's no indication Brave used this filtering. To use the program, you have to print your own mailers. Naturally, the mailers hav…
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They say they're using the USPS's EDDM tool, and they link to it in the post. I clicked, and skimmed until I found this: > Choose the neighborhoods in the EDDM Online Tool where your customers live. Use the tool to target customers by specific demographics such as age, household size, and income. So it seems like the database belongs to the government rather than the startup. It doesn't appear that this had any actua…
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As far as I know, the database is owned by the USPS, and they can't do their job _without_ that information. You can dislike Brave for buying access to the information, or dislike USPS for selling said information. But the information is already collected by USPS so they can do their job.
Why can't they do their job without that information? You can send a letter to an address without the USPS a.) Having the address in their database b.) Knowing who is living there So Brave, the privacy company, is using a service that collects data about people.
Since the outside of all US mail is imaged and stored by the USPS and shared with other government agencies, [1] Brave just gave its user list to the US Government. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pi...
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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…
This sounds more like a traditional direct mailer through a vendor rather than EDDM.
I feel like the criticism towards Brave ITT is unjustified. This is a USPS service which is available to businesses. If you're a privacy conscious person in the US, you've likely opted out of this list. Brave is reaching the people who may not have done this, to the end of getting regular folks to know their alternatives against big tech companies. I guess don't get the ire, or what the expectation is for them to gro…
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Even if the database contains banding by household income for example? Why does the USPS need that to do their job? Brave doesn’t show what targeting was used…
The US Census is public record and breaks down all kinds of demographic information by zip code. The USPS is almost certainly just using census data. Even if they didn't provide the convenience, a marketer could easily replicate what they currently do. If you have a problem with the US Census Bureau collecting demographic data or making it public, those are certainly valid positions to hold. However, point your ire a…