[morganvachon]

Here's the fun thing: I have opted out of blind mailers from the USPS, yet I got one of these Brave mailers last week with my name on it (I'm in the Atlanta area). Just one more reason of many for me to never, ever let Brave near any of my devices.

[dinkleberg]

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?).

[morganvachon]

> 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 use their software.

[jonathansampson]

Brave doesn't harvest or collect any user data; we explicitly requested that no names be printed on these mailers (which was the case prior to this recent batch). You're mistaken about the other issues as well (they are every bit as overblown and misrepresented as this present issue).

"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/.

[morganvachon]

I appreciate the attempt to explain your company's bad behavior, but I'm not convinced. And to be fair, you're not alone in making mistakes in the arena of privacy and security; all the major browsers have privacy-averse settings and "anti-features". The difference with your company is that you falsely advertise yourself as the one true private browser, while simultaneously profiting from your users' personal data. It's a lie, it's a scam, and it's morally reprehensible. You only fixed the issues I brought up after being caught and publicly shamed over them; if you hadn't been caught out you'd likely still be doing those things today. Shame on you.

[jonathansampson]

You've mischaracterized features of Brave. Our code is open-source, it's not difficult to literally "go to the source," (https://code.brave.com and https://github.com/brave) and test the claims of others. You claim that Brave profits off of user data--show me where that is the case. Brave does not collect any user data; we were found to be the "most private" popular browser by reputable researchers in this regard: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

Brave has never been "caught" collecting user data, or abusing user data. Not a single instance of this exists. We believe in "Can't be evil" over "Don't be evil," which means we aim to preclude the potential for abuse at the design stage of ever major effort tied to Brave, and our services/offerings. On the other end, the harvesting and leaking of user data is [standard] in all other major browsers.

[morganvachon]

This is disingenuous at best. The browser itself is open source but show me the source for your data collection servers and crypto scheme servers. What's that? It's not open source? Imagine that!