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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

#171

Post by isoskeles »

If this person doesn't want his donations, or wants people to donate to some fund against malaria, I'm sure Brave can figure out how to redirect his funds to another donation site of his choice as a feature.

Brave's attempt to find a new way to pay content creators (and, sure, insert themselves into the process) seems to be in good faith. And I'll admit that the complaints are mostly in good faith too, especially that there should be a feature to opt-out, or there should be a way to receive your funds automatically (I'm surprised and don't 100% believe that there is not).

But the complaints and arguments saying this is "fraud" seem to be in bad faith. There's no evidence that these donations are completely irretrievable from the creators they were intended to go toward. Stop emotionally throwing around the word "fraud" as if there's criminal intent here for Brave to keep every penny of donations, zero intent to ever make that money available to the intended recipients.

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

#172

Post by jetzzz »

smsm42 wrote: post #118

Is there actual money involved? I have 60 BAT in my Brave account, and I didn't pay a dime to anybody. Yet, looks like I can donate them. Not sure I understand how the system works - am I supposed to eventually buy BAT tokens if I want to donate them?

It is a token issued on Ethereum blockchain and is traded on many exchanges. So yes, you can buy and sell them. Your 60 BAT are worth $8.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/

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

#173

Post by 0xffff2 »

Fuebxien wrote: post #66
gregknicholson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've never used WU, but I'm guessing that they don't divert all payments that go unclaimed for 90 days into their advertising budget.

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

#174

Post by MiddleEndian »

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...

A lot of scams are small enterprises.

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

#175

Post by marcinzm »

brandnewlow wrote: post #81
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…

I work at Brave on the business team. This is helpful feedback. Brave is a startup with a small team earnestly building a new thing that combines a browser with a tipping system, with creator tools, with ad blocking... it's ambitious! As it's a new thing, describing it can be messy sometimes. We're always working to make our language better and clearer though. Thank you for letting us know it fell short for you. To a…

>Each new platform takes time to write support for and we have a long list of features requests. We'll get there!

And until you write that support do you still take tips and send them to the whois account holder of the domain? Or do you block tips?

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

#176

Post by bscphil »

aphextron wrote: post #9

I'd been really loving Brave and using it as my daily driver for a few months now, until that I noticed that little "Brave Ads" icon at the end of the address bar. That's when I realized their entire business model is just in the usurpation of existing Google ad revenue, dressed up with "privacy concerns" for the good PR. This sent me on a journey to find a really solid, free, Chromium based browser that is totally d…

My understanding is that you're experiencing Brave's other project, which is somehow both more scammy and scummy than this one. The idea is to replace the ads already in the web page with "good ads" approved by Brave, and give the original publisher 1/3 of the resulting revenue through some similarly unclear means.

This, of course, is exactly the same model as many pieces of toolbar malware, with the genius addition that by letting publishers opt in to receiving a small fraction of the revenue, they hope to make it easier to accept the loss than to sue.

Of course they'll respond by saying that users choose to download and run Brave. But the long term financial success of the project is dependent on most users either not knowing or not caring that their browser is inserting ads into webpages and taking funding from publishers (and maybe "opt-in" to seeing replacements ads through some UI dark patterns, I don't know). Frankly I don't see any real difference between this and the average toolbar that promises to "add value" to the browser.

Brave has the worst business practices of any open source company I know of, and they're a blight on the community in general.

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

#177

Post by woolvalley »

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…

I use the containers add on, and it's pretty much the only real advantage FF has over chrome.

Still need user switching although, because sometimes I want to separate multiple google/twitter/etc accounts for example and still want the automatic url-based container activation.

If brave implemented containers although, I would probably use it because chrome works better than FF.

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

#178

Post by smacktoward »

brandnewlow wrote: post #81
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…

I work at Brave on the business team. This is helpful feedback. Brave is a startup with a small team earnestly building a new thing that combines a browser with a tipping system, with creator tools, with ad blocking... it's ambitious! As it's a new thing, describing it can be messy sometimes. We're always working to make our language better and clearer though. Thank you for letting us know it fell short for you. To a…

The complaint is that you're soliciting donations in the names of specific individuals without their knowledge or consent.

Relative to that complaint:

> Brave is a startup

... is not relevant.

> with a small team

... is not relevant.

> earnestly

... is not relevant.

> building a new thing

... is not relevant.

> that combines a browser with a tipping system, with creator tools, with ad blocking

... is not relevant.

None of these things are relevant to the complaint being offered. It doesn't require a large team to not solicit money in other peoples' names. It doesn't require an established product to not solicit money in other peoples' names. It odesn't require checking off all the boxes on your feature TODO list to not solicit money in other peoples' names. All it requires is to not solicit money in other peoples' names.

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

#179

Post by paulgb »

bjl wrote: post #166
brandnewlow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specifically. But yes, fellow people should be given the benefit of the doubt in my opinion. I was asking if Brave had done something to merit not getting that.

You're on a thread about Brave shamelessly committing donation fraud and you're surprised people aren't giving you the benefit of the doubt?

This whole episode is a case study of the way people who have convinced themselves they're doing something positive for humanity can find moral justifications for any transgressions along the way.

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

#180

Post by jacques_chester »

GreaterFool wrote: post #158
_0ffh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd be surprised if this will be deemed legal I'm surprised how anyone could think this was a good idea, or even legal. What wouldn't surprise me is an incoming class action.

IANAL but I imagine that the donations are in brave tokens and it may or may not be treated as cash (even though the eventual payout is cash) which may or may not be legal depending on a lot of stuff that's beyond my area of expertise. But if the idea was to 1) create token and 2) YOLO and yeah, lawsuits incoming. But it could be that they have good lawyers and that it is actually legal (although as I write it I don'…

Trusteeship, tax laws and the like typically apply to anything of value, whether it's legally a currency or not.

If the tokens are valueless, then what is it they're offering? If they have value, how are they excused from usual rules?

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