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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

#321

Post by brandnewlow »

hollasch wrote: post #185

My basic objection to the "opt-out" scheme is that my browser is effectively acting as a man-in-the-middle agent, confusing both the reader and the author, and co-opting any existing compensation or donation procedure. For example, consider http://www.vim.org , which hosts the text editor Vim. The author, Bram Moolenaar, makes this editor freely-available, and asks that any donations be directed to ICCF Holand, a cha…

Thanks for laying this out. Due to great posts like this and many others in this thread and on Twitter our eng. team is pushing up a bunch of changes tomorrow. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

The bottom line is that it will be much much much clearer that unverified creators are not participating in Brave Rewards and what happens to any BAT tips a user tries to send to one. We'll also not be using any creative assets at all from unverified creators like their Youtube images. In the post we also commit to looking into whether to block attempts to tip unverified creators altogether.

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

#322

Post by brandnewlow »

bscphil wrote: post #176
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…

Brave doesn't insert ads into the browser or otherwise replace web site ads. This is a thing people like to say about the company because it'd be obviously lame if we did this...but we don't do this. Do you have a citation for the claims that Brave does this?

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

#323

Post by brandnewlow »

ubernostrum wrote: post #279
brandnewlow wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty accurate read on things. We've never actually recycled any funds and also hadn't considered that many creators would interpret our UI/UX as "solicitation" vs. "letting a user do a thing they want to do in our browser." In any event, the confusion is our fault and we're working on updating the UI and language to be clear based on all the feedback we've gotten.

How about instead you shut this off and rebuild it to be explicitly opt-in only? Or, better for you personally: how about you hand in your resignation and retain an attorney? Here's the thing: people who get away with this type of thing (sorry, "exciting and new crowdfunding option for creators", or whatever y'all prefer to call it) tend to get away with it only for as long as the targets of their "fundraising" are s…

You make a lot of great arguments against business practices we have no intention of pursuing. We shipped some poorly-considered UI, got a bunch of deserved flack for it, and are pushing up fixes swiftly (tomorrow). You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

Thanks for your passion for creators and for those of modest means and with disabilities. The internet is awesome in part because it's a place where everyone and anyone can contribute.

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

#324

Post by brandnewlow »

rchaud wrote: post #133
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.

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?

This was not our intent. We're shipping a bunch of changes tomorrow that we hope fix this: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

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

#325

Post by brandnewlow »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #184
rchaud wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was interested in Brave after hearing it mentioned here a fair bit, for innovating new ways for creators to get paid... after this story though? Knowing they effectively scam users out of money under the pretense of it really being the creator? That's fraud as far as I'm concerned (maybe not legally, but to me it's a con, and scummy). Interest has dropped to 0, and they go to my shitlist with all the other crytpo-s…

We agree the UI in that screenshot tells the wrong story. It doesn't represent what we're trying to do so we're shipping a bunch of changes tomorrow that we hope will fix things: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

We'd love another shot at winning your interest. Thanks for caring about finding new ways to get creators paid.

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

#326

Post by brandnewlow »

imtringued wrote: post #268
detaro wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show screenshots of that? What do the prompts from https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1076221401353207808 look like for a verified publisher?

Probably something like this... https://twitter.com/JTremback/status/1076213808706641925

We're shipping a bunch of fixes tomorrow that will (we hope) dramatically improve this: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

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

#327

Post by brandnewlow »

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?

We don't do that and don't aim to do that. We shipped some bad UI, got a bunch of flack for it, and are hustling to get it fixed and improved. You can read about what we're doing here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

Thanks for caring about this being done in a respectful, thoughtful way. We'll keep trying to do better.

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

#328

Post by brandnewlow »

ivank wrote: post #229
jblow wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in suing them if they have a page up for me. How do I tell if they do?

It looks like an in-browser thing: https://ludios.org/tmp/jon_blow-fs8.png https://ludios.org/tmp/jon_blow2-fs8.png

We're shipping changes tomorrow that will fix the problems with these overlays to make it clear unverified creators are not part of Brave Rewards and won't be receiving tips directly. You can read about them here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

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

#329

Post by bscphil »

brandnewlow wrote: post #322
bscphil wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Brave doesn't insert ads into the browser or otherwise replace web site ads. This is a thing people like to say about the company because it'd be obviously lame if we did this...but we don't do this. Do you have a citation for the claims that Brave does this?

If that's not what your Wikipedia page means, then it could hardly be more misleading.

"Brave Software has announced that it is developing a feature allowing users to opt in to receiving ads sold by the company in place of ads blocked by the browser.[8][9][10] Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue."

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

#330

Post by brandnewlow »

jblow wrote: post #212
davidgerard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would be interested in suing them if they have a page up for me. How do I tell if they do?

We don't publish pages for creators at all. We did ship bad UI in our browser that didn't make it clear to opted in users that non-verified creators like yourself aren't part of Brave Rewards.

We're pushing up fixes tomorrow that (we hope) make it a lot clearer: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

(Sidenote: Thank you for the Hedge Maze puzzles in the Keep. They were a gaming highlight for me last year.)

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