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by st3fan 1479 days ago
Be careful with the right wording here: this USPS service is not selling any data.

It is just delivering snail mail.

The only data flow here is from Brave to USPS: please send our mailing to this definition of the target group.

USPS does not send Brave a list of addresses or even names. Brave does not give USPS a list of addresses or names.

2 comments

This is exactly how Google operates yet many folks seem to define / consider that as “selling the data”.

It’s really about “leveraging access to / monetizing the data”.

The point is that by paying for EDDM, Brave is funding and supporting that financial model (targeted advertising) which many folks who use Brave want to eliminate.

So some amount of annoyance expressed by their users makes sense to me.

"our EDDM vendor" seems to imply a third party getting the addresses to print (because there's no need to keep the vendor name secret if it's the USPS), but maybe they just thought it sounds better than saying "the USPS".
Someone has to print the mailers. The USPS lists the EDDM vendors on its website and they work through the USPS.

https://printerdirectory.usps.com/listing/#/results

The mailer itself and the address can be printed separately. I didn't dive deep enough to confirm it, but I think these companies print the mailer and USPS prints the addresses.