14 ms·

Brave’s use of direct mailers

102 points by open-paren 4y ago

paulgb 4y ago
It seems like a weird mia culpa. If I’m understanding right, they’re not sorry for sending the mailers, or working with a data broker to get the addresses, just for the fact that names were printed on the envelopes? I wonder who is concerned about the last one that isn’t more concerned about the first two.
- boucher 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't get it either. Is there anybody who doesn't get this kind of mail at home addressed to them by name all the time?
  - smeej 4y ago
    Not from companies I've never interacted with, no. I haven't done any of the extreme privacy things, but I do use a PO box for almost everything, and thus I really don't ever get anything addressed to my name sent to my actual residence.
    - Firehawke 4y ago
      Really? Because every time a new dentist office, grocery store, etc. opens up I get unsolicited mail from them to let me know they're now a thing in my neighborhood. Does it bother me? Not in the slightest. It's a community notice, and the Brave thing would only annoy me if it hit the levels that AOL CDs were at in the 90s.
      - drusepth 4y ago
        This is probably a very location-dependent experience. I had literal stacks of spam mail every single mail day when I lived in Springfield and Kansas City, almost zero spam mail over entire years when I lived in smaller Missouri cities, and nowadays get maybe ~1-2 spam pamphlets per month at most here in Portland. Probably based on a mix of local laws and/or how profitable each city is to market to.
      - smeej 4y ago
        I get plenty of things like this addressed to the current resident of my house. None of them are addressed to me personally by name.
- rpdillon 4y ago
  > data broker If I'm understanding the EDDM tool correctly, the data broker appears to be the USPS.
- jayofdoom 4y ago
  They didn't work with a data broker. You can pay the post office in the US to send your mailer to every single address in a given zip code. This sort of bulk mailing represents the majority of your junk mail.
  - toma_caliente 4y ago
    Having worked in marketing, they absolutely worked with a data broker. You don't blindly send out mailers. You use data brokers to zone in on a target market. "This zip code is more like to buy X while this zip code is more like to buy Y."
    - concinds 4y ago
      All direct mail marketers do this, because it allows better targeting (& re-targeting old prospects & previous customers) but Brave explicitly said they didn't, and only went through the USPS's service.
      - js212 4y ago
        The USPS didn’t mess up. They are clearly using some sort of vendor to send out the mail.
    - dimitrios1 4y ago
      The USPS sells all the addresses themselves.
- thehonest 4y ago
  Yip. The whole story is weird.
- wzdd 4y ago
  Even if we accept that it's just about the names, it's a weird mea culpa. Obviously they knew the names, because they accidentally printed them. So what they're apologising for is making it so obvious that they knew the names, or, to put it another way, they're apologising for failing to provide the illusion of anonymity to people who were not anonymous at all. For a privacy-focused browser, that is definitely odd.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    Brave didn't do the printing; that is (and has been since 2020) handled by the EDDM vendor. Brave doesn't want any user data; we prefer that information to stay with the United States Postal Service, which has legitimate claim over such information.
- panny 4y ago
  Addresses are not secret. Printing the name with the address might seem like a privacy faux pas, but in actuality it's a mailing faux pas. If USPS knows you don't live there anymore, they return to sender. That's a lot of expensive postcards going around for nothing. If however, it is addressed to "current resident" it's not a problem. The story seems like trying to make lemons into lemonade. "Well, we wasted money, but maybe we can get a bit of privacy protecting glow from this cock-up anyway."
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  I work at Brave. We don't get addresses; we don't want that type of data (we don't want any of your data). The addresses are printed after Brave's QA process has completed. We asked that names NOT be printed on the mailers, but have no way to verify that they were excluded, since that would expose sensitive user data to us (which we do not want). We didn't work with any data broker; we simply provided mailers and desired zip codes (for 7 cities) via the EDDM service.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- bzxcvbn 4y ago
  Creating paper waste is making the world a better place?
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Direct mail is a very effective means of marketing. The recipient has to actively deal with it, and is almost always the “head of household.” If you want to send ads that are interacted with by someone capable of making a purchase - mailing works. I don’t know if “waste” is quote right.
    - seized 4y ago
      Maybe you closely analyse mailers/junk mail/etc but most people ignore it. If it's not an envelope it goes into my recycling bin directly as a stack. It is waste, especially for people who don't recycle.
    - ntoskrnl 4y ago
      Waste is exactly right. https://truthinadvertising.org/articles/the-cost-of-junk-mail/ https://truthinadvertising.org/articles/the-cost-of-junk-mai...
- miguelmurca 4y ago
  What? The article is apologizing for a mistake (with questionable implications, as pointed out by other comments).
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Sorry missed the /s on my comment.
    - 4y ago
charlfields 4y ago
I don’t know if it was coincidence but I got two mailers the same week after I downloaded brave into my laptop, It freaked me out to think they already knew my address by just installing the browser. I hope everyone learns from this and use other methods of marketing for companies that market themselves as privacy first.
- mcculley 4y ago
  > It freaked me out to think they already knew my address by just installing the browser Did you really think that? I would have considered it to more likely be a coincidence.
echelon 4y ago
I would be very suspicious of mail coming from a company that touted privacy that had my name on it. Especially if I've never done business with them. Brave is in a weird market. Unless you pay for it, you're still the product. The best thing Brave or Mozilla could do would be to legislatively kill Chrome (and perhaps the iOS Safari-only policy). With control of browsers out of the hands of advertising agencies (Google), these companies could then raise their rates on an acceptable ads program sans the tracking. More revenue, sustainable market, and better for the world.
WoahNoun 4y ago
So physical spam is their scaling plan?
- endless1234 4y ago
  Yeah, seems pretty desperate to me. "We couldn't get enough people to install our app, so we started sending them junk mail urging them to do so."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
mmastrac 4y ago
- rpdillon 4y ago
  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 actual privacy impact, beyond the perception that Brave is targeting folks by name.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    No privacy impact. Brave doesn't have any names or addresses; those are with the United States Postal Service (never exposed to Brave). We asked that names NOT be printed on these mailers. Previous batches went out without names, as intended. You can see an example of this from a Tweet last month: https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588.
- Vorh 4y ago
  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.
  - edf13 4y ago
    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…
    - User23 4y ago
      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 at the right target.
password4321 4y ago
I like Brave. But they always seem to be "asking forgiveness rather than permission".
- drusepth 4y ago
  Not the best vibe from a company whose livelihood is dependent on convincing more and more people to trust them with more and more data.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    Brave doesn't ask you to trust it with more and more data; we explicitly do not want any of your data. This issue did not impact user data or privacy in any way either.
    - password4321 4y ago
      It's nice of you to stop by HN when your keywords are hit so you can rebut each comment, but it will stand in the record as PR. Simply put, Brave takes calculated risks to expand its revenue/marketshare. I only hear about it when things go wrong. It must be worth it, because it keeps happening.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      There are many facets to the Brave browser and the server-side Brave services it uses that would allow the Brave company to covertly collect all kinds of data from its users; Brave simply asks users to just trust that they don't want or aren't collecting that data. If one wouldn't trust a particular company with their data, I don't see why one would be any more likely to trust a company simply claiming they're not collecting said data. I do appreciate the few features designed to make it technically impossible for Brave to collect some/most of that feature's user data from, though.
      - jonathansampson 4y ago
        Data-harvesting would be quite difficult to hide given our source code is open to the public (i.e. https://code.brave.com https://code.brave.com and https://github.com/brave https://github.com/brave), and that we encourage web-proxy evaluation of network activity (a la https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/). In fact, reputable researchers in the privacy space have reviewed Brave, finding it to be the "most private" browser, in a class of its own: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. But does not collect user data--we don't want your data.
longrod 4y ago
This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? The scenario is something like this: Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave. Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data. Random person: how did you get my address then right after I literally installed Brave? Brave: you see, it's very private because we can't see the address or who the mail is going to go to. We just contracted a mailer who sent this marketing newsletter to everyone in their database. Random person: ... Brave: maybe you didn't understand but we, the brave company, didn't see who the mail would go to. That's privacy right? Random person: deletes Brave The problem here is that a privacy oriented company is accepting and making use of a very non-private method to spread privacy and Brave. Contradictory in it's core. I still like Brave and what they represent. I am a fan. They do a lot of things right but this was baffling. I don't know how they could allow something like this to pass through the filter...
- mixedCase 4y ago
  > Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? Because that is not even remotely the case as is clearly stated in the article in the first few sentences.
  - longrod 4y ago
    The fact that they have to explain themselves with an article speaks a lot. Was this specific method necessary? I am sure it cost them quite a bit and were the results worth it? How many people would read the article? How many people would simply run away from Brave due to this? How many people would care to research it a bit more? Privacy is such a sensitive topic for privacy-respecting people that most of the time even a little doubt blows up the ship. This was a huge risk taken by Brave and unnecessarily so because they didn't do anything extraordinary by sending people mail. Moreover, can this one article stop the negative sentiment from spreading? I don't think so.
- flaviut 4y ago
logicalmonster 4y ago
- rhexs 4y ago
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    He didn't donate to the wrong religion he donated to Prop 8 a proposal in California to ban same-sex marriage. Acting like same-sex marriage is a religion is bigoted and should not be tolerated here.
    - VanTheBrand 4y ago
      Prop 8 was the Mormons. I agree wrong religion is maybe confusing but that’s both who was behind it and why he donated.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        So he didn't give money to support Prop 8 and only gave it to the mormon church?
  - My71staccount 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
fortyseven 4y ago
Once again reinforcing my initial vibe of Brave being sketchy as shit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hunterb123 4y ago
  They used a gov run mailer and they don't have access to the database. Would you like to expand on your "initial vibe" and Brave being "sketchy as shit"?
sha256sum 4y ago
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 grow. Would you rather them take out Google or Facebook ads? /s
- morganvachon 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
        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/ 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/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
user3939382 4y ago
Clearly someone from AOL has slipped into management.
powersnail 4y ago
I trust that Brave doesn't have a database with residents' names and addresses, but the problem with the marketing stunt, is that the moment they have to explain that it's not actually nefarious, they've already lost. It's like making a misleading advertisement, but instead of misleading the users to trust them, it shocked the potential user base into a false sense of insecurity.
schmichael 4y ago
I would take quite a bit of tracking in exchange for no more junk mailers like this. They seem to be missing the forest for the trees: sure tracking is problematic, but Annoying Ads, however you define them, have always been the biggest pain point. Whether it’s popups, popunders, interstitials, autoplaying, made to look like news, or killing trees to fill your mailbox: we’ve always been at war with annoying ads. This seems like an indication Brave is actually out of touch with what consumers want: less obnoxious ads. They’re so focused on tracking they’re willing to annoy people with junk mail.
- user3939382 4y ago
  dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com allows you to get rid of 99% of junk mail. If you want to go deeper: https://optout.lexisnexis.com/ https://optout.lexisnexis.com/ https://risk.lexisnexis.com/prescreened-offers-optout https://risk.lexisnexis.com/prescreened-offers-optout
Barrin92 4y ago
To me these little things are what turned me away from using the browser. Every time you install it somewhere you have to manually turn all the crypto ads off, it's the only thing that doesn't sync across devices. These little nudges and 'growth hacks' if you will including that mailing campaign is exactly what I don't want in software that allegedly puts the user first. It doesn't seem like there is genuine innovation in Brave, they still rely on ads, and sending people physical spam in the mail or showing you 'privacy respecting' ones online obfuscated with a bunch of attention tokens doesn't really change anything.
- prepend 4y ago
  > including that mailing campaign is exactly what I don't want in software that allegedly puts the user first I don’t get what the issue is with the mailers. The names being present or not isn’t really important as they just bought distribution lists and mailed stuff to them. Whether they print the name or not, they know them. This seems pretty normal and reasonable for a “growth hack” and still preserved privacy.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >The names being present or not isn’t really important as they just bought distribution lists and mailed stuff to them Based on my understanding they didn't even buy distribution lists. They just told USPS to deliver their ad to every house in a given zip code.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  - pgt 4y ago
    Junk mail affects my life.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
Why does this process involve printing addresses at all? In Germany "you" (probably needs to be a company of some size) go to "the post office" (actual delivery probably directly to a distribution center), give them a stack of flyers, and say "one of these into each mailbox in this ZIP code, please". The mailman then takes a stack of said flyers and starts stuffing mailboxes as he goes along his route (excluding those mailboxes that have "no ads" stickers). This avoids the need to treat the spam as addressed mail, because you don't really care which person gets which of the (identical) flyer. This makes handling much easier and as a result, cheaper.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Probably to enable opt-out which most people don’t use but is available at dmachoice.org
- gruez 4y ago
  You're right, you don't need addresses to deliver ads to every household. However, addressed mail probably gets better engagement than unaddressed mail, so USPS/EDDM vendors allow you to insert the name/address of the recipient, based on whatever is in their database. Brave didn't intend for this option to be enabled, but due to some oversight it was enabled, hence why the ads had addresses on them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gtvwill 4y ago
Crikey brave really come across like the telemarketing products of yesteryear. Kinda looks useful from the outside, but doesn't actually do anything better mostly just worse than all the optio a you had before. Lol the only people I've encountered in the wild who had brave on their systems were folks here in Aus who were deep down the rabbit hole of American Christian right wing nut job conspiracy theories, like full maga supporting fruit loops.
My70thaccount 4y ago
Buttons840 4y ago
I have a cynical take on the prevalence of marketing in our society. This may not apply to Brave specifically, but while we're on the topic of marketing: I wonder if growing wealthy inequality means that consumers simply don't have enough wealth to make honest exchanges worth while. The powers-that-be look for ways to "grow" and consider making an honest product and simply selling it, but the common people don't have enough wealth to give in exchange for an honest product, so instead they put their money into advertising and other "growth" efforts. Brave may be an example of this, what if consumers simply don't have enough wealth to finance the development of an honest consumer focused browser? In that case you would expect to see companies like Brave, even if their intentions are good, turning to less honest sources of income. Consumer focused software seems to be on the decline, and for the first time I'm wondering if this is due to large scale economic reasons.
- ElvisTrout 4y ago
  Marketing is very profitable. Sadly word of mouth is a painfully slow way to sell even a good product.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    Marketing isn't the only example. Marketing does have an important purpose to play, as you say. Take for example Diablo Immortal. Blizzard and Diablo have tons of fans. People want an old school Diablo, a game that puts the player first, a game they can buy for a flat fee and then have and enjoy for decades like they have the others in the series. But Blizzard doesn't care, consumers can't pay enough to make it worth their while, so instead they'll deliver a thin veil over gambling and exploitation and call it Diablo Immortal.
happytiger 4y ago
Wait until they start sending CDs…
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Safari is the most private mainstream browser IMO. Private relay, third party tracking blockers, good enough support for 1Blocker to keep my laptop fan down. I use brave for work though since it’s closest to chrome and the dev tools are better. Their slightly annoying shenanigans every few months still seem better than Google having a high quality data stream directly from the browser itself
_9hey 4y ago
What I don’t understand is how their vendor even got the names of the recipients. That is the violation of privacy, the mailed letters are only the symptom of a poorly designed system.
- gruez 4y ago
  It seems conceivable that the vendor doesn't have the address/name list, but USPS.
Animats 4y ago
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-piece-mail-us-shares-agencies-request-it-280614 https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pi...
- VanTheBrand 4y ago
  No it didn’t. Read the article. They sent this to entire zip codes. It’s not targeted at users. If you are a user and you also got it, that’s a coincidence. All your neighbors in the same zip code also got it whether they are users or not,
  - Animats 4y ago
    Then why does their mailing piece say "New Brave User"? Their spin control says they sent it to entire zip codes. Is there independent confirmation of that?
    - gruez 4y ago
      > Then why does their mailing piece say "New Brave User"? You're reading too much into this. If you look at the other elements of the ad, it's clear that the purpose of the ad is to get you to install brave, which makes you a "new brave user".
    - VanTheBrand 4y ago
      So you think their plan was to send this to people who already signed up for…retention? Seems very unlikely. I’d imagine awareness is a much bigger problem vs retention for them at this stage. Also the rest of the copy doesn’t make much sense if this was the case. You clearly want it to be true that something nefarious is happening but all evidence points away from that.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  The names and addresses are with the USPS. Brave (hello, I'm a team engineer) used the EDDM offering of the United States Postal Service. We were attracted to this method of advertising in part because it never exposes sensitive information to us at Brave. User data, instead, is with the USPS, which has legitimate claim over such information. As stated in our blog post, we sent only the artwork (for the mailer itself), and the Zip Codes we aimed to reach. That's it. We also asked that names NOT be printed, which was the case for earlier batches (e.g. https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588). I hope this helps!
jrochkind1 4y ago
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.
- Amezarak 4y ago
  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 have to be addressed, or they cannot be mailed. The vendor Brave used to print the mailers included the resident's name, which is typical but not mandatory. Some people saw this and got freaked out, thinking that Brave was tracking them or had bought their data, the implicit thought being it was from some company dedicated to that. Instead, the USPS just used the USPS EDDM program that anyone can use. Brave apologized, destroyed the unsent mailers, and reprinted new ones without names. Basically, it looked bad to some people, but it's not clear to me that Brave did anything bad except from a publicity perspective. Most people regularly get such mailers through the same program. (Someone else says in this thread that they don't get them, but they also mention having a PO Box, which is a filter in the EDDM tool most people are going to use.) The EDDM program website is here, and it walks you through the process: https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm You choose a vendor to print your mailers: https://printerdirectory.usps.com/listing/#/ https://printerdirectory.usps.com/listing/#/ Likely Brave did not communicate to their printer vendor the necessity of not printing names. But the vendor has them anyway. It's possible through the EDDM program to see your physical mail pieces (if you're doing the drop off), so hypothetically I suppose Brave could have collected this information.
  - jonathansampson 4y ago
    We did communicate our desire to exclude names from mailers; you can see an example from last month at https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588. Because we wish not to be exposed to any user data, our QA process ends prior to the stage where names would be printed. Once we learned names had been printed on a recent batch (a deviation from previous batches), we took prompt action to "halt and catch fire," so to speak.
ozten 4y ago
I don't envy the job of Brave marketers. Brave's "champion customers" are often people that hate any form of marketing, so every experiment risks alienating these key early adopters.
- freediver 4y ago
  Hm, what would motivate people who hate any form of marketing to use a browser that mainly depends on ads for revenue?
100xdang 4y ago
lobocinza 4y ago
Brave is Chrome with more hypocrisy.

102 points by open-paren 4y ago

It seems like a weird mia culpa. If I’m understanding right, they’re not sorry for sending the mailers, or working with a data broker to get the addresses, just for the fact that names were printed on the envelopes? I wonder who is concerned about the last one that isn’t more concerned about the first two.

boucher 4y ago
Yeah, I don't get it either. Is there anybody who doesn't get this kind of mail at home addressed to them by name all the time?
- smeej 4y ago
  Not from companies I've never interacted with, no. I haven't done any of the extreme privacy things, but I do use a PO box for almost everything, and thus I really don't ever get anything addressed to my name sent to my actual residence.
  - Firehawke 4y ago
    Really? Because every time a new dentist office, grocery store, etc. opens up I get unsolicited mail from them to let me know they're now a thing in my neighborhood. Does it bother me? Not in the slightest. It's a community notice, and the Brave thing would only annoy me if it hit the levels that AOL CDs were at in the 90s.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      This is probably a very location-dependent experience. I had literal stacks of spam mail every single mail day when I lived in Springfield and Kansas City, almost zero spam mail over entire years when I lived in smaller Missouri cities, and nowadays get maybe ~1-2 spam pamphlets per month at most here in Portland. Probably based on a mix of local laws and/or how profitable each city is to market to.
    - smeej 4y ago
      I get plenty of things like this addressed to the current resident of my house. None of them are addressed to me personally by name.
rpdillon 4y ago
> data broker If I'm understanding the EDDM tool correctly, the data broker appears to be the USPS.
jayofdoom 4y ago
They didn't work with a data broker. You can pay the post office in the US to send your mailer to every single address in a given zip code. This sort of bulk mailing represents the majority of your junk mail.
- toma_caliente 4y ago
  Having worked in marketing, they absolutely worked with a data broker. You don't blindly send out mailers. You use data brokers to zone in on a target market. "This zip code is more like to buy X while this zip code is more like to buy Y."
  - concinds 4y ago
    All direct mail marketers do this, because it allows better targeting (& re-targeting old prospects & previous customers) but Brave explicitly said they didn't, and only went through the USPS's service.
    - js212 4y ago
      The USPS didn’t mess up. They are clearly using some sort of vendor to send out the mail.
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    The USPS sells all the addresses themselves.
thehonest 4y ago
Yip. The whole story is weird.
wzdd 4y ago
Even if we accept that it's just about the names, it's a weird mea culpa. Obviously they knew the names, because they accidentally printed them. So what they're apologising for is making it so obvious that they knew the names, or, to put it another way, they're apologising for failing to provide the illusion of anonymity to people who were not anonymous at all. For a privacy-focused browser, that is definitely odd.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  Brave didn't do the printing; that is (and has been since 2020) handled by the EDDM vendor. Brave doesn't want any user data; we prefer that information to stay with the United States Postal Service, which has legitimate claim over such information.
panny 4y ago
Addresses are not secret. Printing the name with the address might seem like a privacy faux pas, but in actuality it's a mailing faux pas. If USPS knows you don't live there anymore, they return to sender. That's a lot of expensive postcards going around for nothing. If however, it is addressed to "current resident" it's not a problem. The story seems like trying to make lemons into lemonade. "Well, we wasted money, but maybe we can get a bit of privacy protecting glow from this cock-up anyway."
jonathansampson 4y ago
I work at Brave. We don't get addresses; we don't want that type of data (we don't want any of your data). The addresses are printed after Brave's QA process has completed. We asked that names NOT be printed on the mailers, but have no way to verify that they were excluded, since that would expose sensitive user data to us (which we do not want). We didn't work with any data broker; we simply provided mailers and desired zip codes (for 7 cities) via the EDDM service.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

bzxcvbn 4y ago
Creating paper waste is making the world a better place?
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Direct mail is a very effective means of marketing. The recipient has to actively deal with it, and is almost always the “head of household.” If you want to send ads that are interacted with by someone capable of making a purchase - mailing works. I don’t know if “waste” is quote right.
  - seized 4y ago
    Maybe you closely analyse mailers/junk mail/etc but most people ignore it. If it's not an envelope it goes into my recycling bin directly as a stack. It is waste, especially for people who don't recycle.
  - ntoskrnl 4y ago
    Waste is exactly right. https://truthinadvertising.org/articles/the-cost-of-junk-mail/ https://truthinadvertising.org/articles/the-cost-of-junk-mai...
miguelmurca 4y ago
What? The article is apologizing for a mistake (with questionable implications, as pointed out by other comments).
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Sorry missed the /s on my comment.
  - 4y ago

charlfields 4y ago

I don’t know if it was coincidence but I got two mailers the same week after I downloaded brave into my laptop, It freaked me out to think they already knew my address by just installing the browser. I hope everyone learns from this and use other methods of marketing for companies that market themselves as privacy first.

mcculley 4y ago
> It freaked me out to think they already knew my address by just installing the browser Did you really think that? I would have considered it to more likely be a coincidence.

echelon 4y ago

I would be very suspicious of mail coming from a company that touted privacy that had my name on it. Especially if I've never done business with them. Brave is in a weird market. Unless you pay for it, you're still the product. The best thing Brave or Mozilla could do would be to legislatively kill Chrome (and perhaps the iOS Safari-only policy). With control of browsers out of the hands of advertising agencies (Google), these companies could then raise their rates on an acceptable ads program sans the tracking. More revenue, sustainable market, and better for the world.

WoahNoun 4y ago

So physical spam is their scaling plan?

endless1234 4y ago
Yeah, seems pretty desperate to me. "We couldn't get enough people to install our app, so we started sending them junk mail urging them to do so."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

mmastrac 4y ago

rpdillon 4y ago
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 actual privacy impact, beyond the perception that Brave is targeting folks by name.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  No privacy impact. Brave doesn't have any names or addresses; those are with the United States Postal Service (never exposed to Brave). We asked that names NOT be printed on these mailers. Previous batches went out without names, as intended. You can see an example of this from a Tweet last month: https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588.
Vorh 4y ago
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.
- edf13 4y ago
  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…
  - User23 4y ago
    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 at the right target.

password4321 4y ago

I like Brave. But they always seem to be "asking forgiveness rather than permission".

drusepth 4y ago
Not the best vibe from a company whose livelihood is dependent on convincing more and more people to trust them with more and more data.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  Brave doesn't ask you to trust it with more and more data; we explicitly do not want any of your data. This issue did not impact user data or privacy in any way either.
  - password4321 4y ago
    It's nice of you to stop by HN when your keywords are hit so you can rebut each comment, but it will stand in the record as PR. Simply put, Brave takes calculated risks to expand its revenue/marketshare. I only hear about it when things go wrong. It must be worth it, because it keeps happening.
  - drusepth 4y ago
    There are many facets to the Brave browser and the server-side Brave services it uses that would allow the Brave company to covertly collect all kinds of data from its users; Brave simply asks users to just trust that they don't want or aren't collecting that data. If one wouldn't trust a particular company with their data, I don't see why one would be any more likely to trust a company simply claiming they're not collecting said data. I do appreciate the few features designed to make it technically impossible for Brave to collect some/most of that feature's user data from, though.
    - jonathansampson 4y ago
      Data-harvesting would be quite difficult to hide given our source code is open to the public (i.e. https://code.brave.com https://code.brave.com and https://github.com/brave https://github.com/brave), and that we encourage web-proxy evaluation of network activity (a la https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/). In fact, reputable researchers in the privacy space have reviewed Brave, finding it to be the "most private" browser, in a class of its own: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. But does not collect user data--we don't want your data.

longrod 4y ago

This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? The scenario is something like this: Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave. Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data. Random person: how did you get my address then right after I literally installed Brave? Brave: you see, it's very private because we can't see the address or who the mail is going to go to. We just contracted a mailer who sent this marketing newsletter to everyone in their database. Random person: ... Brave: maybe you didn't understand but we, the brave company, didn't see who the mail would go to. That's privacy right? Random person: deletes Brave The problem here is that a privacy oriented company is accepting and making use of a very non-private method to spread privacy and Brave. Contradictory in it's core. I still like Brave and what they represent. I am a fan. They do a lot of things right but this was baffling. I don't know how they could allow something like this to pass through the filter...

mixedCase 4y ago
> Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point? Because that is not even remotely the case as is clearly stated in the article in the first few sentences.
- longrod 4y ago
  The fact that they have to explain themselves with an article speaks a lot. Was this specific method necessary? I am sure it cost them quite a bit and were the results worth it? How many people would read the article? How many people would simply run away from Brave due to this? How many people would care to research it a bit more? Privacy is such a sensitive topic for privacy-respecting people that most of the time even a little doubt blows up the ship. This was a huge risk taken by Brave and unnecessarily so because they didn't do anything extraordinary by sending people mail. Moreover, can this one article stop the negative sentiment from spreading? I don't think so.
flaviut 4y ago

logicalmonster 4y ago

rhexs 4y ago
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  He didn't donate to the wrong religion he donated to Prop 8 a proposal in California to ban same-sex marriage. Acting like same-sex marriage is a religion is bigoted and should not be tolerated here.
  - VanTheBrand 4y ago
    Prop 8 was the Mormons. I agree wrong religion is maybe confusing but that’s both who was behind it and why he donated.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      So he didn't give money to support Prop 8 and only gave it to the mormon church?
- My71staccount 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

fortyseven 4y ago

Once again reinforcing my initial vibe of Brave being sketchy as shit.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hunterb123 4y ago
They used a gov run mailer and they don't have access to the database. Would you like to expand on your "initial vibe" and Brave being "sketchy as shit"?

sha256sum 4y ago

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 grow. Would you rather them take out Google or Facebook ads? /s

morganvachon 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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/ 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/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.

user3939382 4y ago

Clearly someone from AOL has slipped into management.

powersnail 4y ago

I trust that Brave doesn't have a database with residents' names and addresses, but the problem with the marketing stunt, is that the moment they have to explain that it's not actually nefarious, they've already lost. It's like making a misleading advertisement, but instead of misleading the users to trust them, it shocked the potential user base into a false sense of insecurity.

schmichael 4y ago

I would take quite a bit of tracking in exchange for no more junk mailers like this. They seem to be missing the forest for the trees: sure tracking is problematic, but Annoying Ads, however you define them, have always been the biggest pain point. Whether it’s popups, popunders, interstitials, autoplaying, made to look like news, or killing trees to fill your mailbox: we’ve always been at war with annoying ads. This seems like an indication Brave is actually out of touch with what consumers want: less obnoxious ads. They’re so focused on tracking they’re willing to annoy people with junk mail.

user3939382 4y ago
dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com allows you to get rid of 99% of junk mail. If you want to go deeper: https://optout.lexisnexis.com/ https://optout.lexisnexis.com/ https://risk.lexisnexis.com/prescreened-offers-optout https://risk.lexisnexis.com/prescreened-offers-optout

Barrin92 4y ago

To me these little things are what turned me away from using the browser. Every time you install it somewhere you have to manually turn all the crypto ads off, it's the only thing that doesn't sync across devices. These little nudges and 'growth hacks' if you will including that mailing campaign is exactly what I don't want in software that allegedly puts the user first. It doesn't seem like there is genuine innovation in Brave, they still rely on ads, and sending people physical spam in the mail or showing you 'privacy respecting' ones online obfuscated with a bunch of attention tokens doesn't really change anything.

prepend 4y ago
> including that mailing campaign is exactly what I don't want in software that allegedly puts the user first I don’t get what the issue is with the mailers. The names being present or not isn’t really important as they just bought distribution lists and mailed stuff to them. Whether they print the name or not, they know them. This seems pretty normal and reasonable for a “growth hack” and still preserved privacy.
- gruez 4y ago
  >The names being present or not isn’t really important as they just bought distribution lists and mailed stuff to them Based on my understanding they didn't even buy distribution lists. They just told USPS to deliver their ad to every house in a given zip code.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
- pgt 4y ago
  Junk mail affects my life.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

Why does this process involve printing addresses at all? In Germany "you" (probably needs to be a company of some size) go to "the post office" (actual delivery probably directly to a distribution center), give them a stack of flyers, and say "one of these into each mailbox in this ZIP code, please". The mailman then takes a stack of said flyers and starts stuffing mailboxes as he goes along his route (excluding those mailboxes that have "no ads" stickers). This avoids the need to treat the spam as addressed mail, because you don't really care which person gets which of the (identical) flyer. This makes handling much easier and as a result, cheaper.

user3939382 4y ago
Probably to enable opt-out which most people don’t use but is available at dmachoice.org
gruez 4y ago
You're right, you don't need addresses to deliver ads to every household. However, addressed mail probably gets better engagement than unaddressed mail, so USPS/EDDM vendors allow you to insert the name/address of the recipient, based on whatever is in their database. Brave didn't intend for this option to be enabled, but due to some oversight it was enabled, hence why the ads had addresses on them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gtvwill 4y ago

Crikey brave really come across like the telemarketing products of yesteryear. Kinda looks useful from the outside, but doesn't actually do anything better mostly just worse than all the optio a you had before. Lol the only people I've encountered in the wild who had brave on their systems were folks here in Aus who were deep down the rabbit hole of American Christian right wing nut job conspiracy theories, like full maga supporting fruit loops.

My70thaccount 4y ago

Buttons840 4y ago

I have a cynical take on the prevalence of marketing in our society. This may not apply to Brave specifically, but while we're on the topic of marketing: I wonder if growing wealthy inequality means that consumers simply don't have enough wealth to make honest exchanges worth while. The powers-that-be look for ways to "grow" and consider making an honest product and simply selling it, but the common people don't have enough wealth to give in exchange for an honest product, so instead they put their money into advertising and other "growth" efforts. Brave may be an example of this, what if consumers simply don't have enough wealth to finance the development of an honest consumer focused browser? In that case you would expect to see companies like Brave, even if their intentions are good, turning to less honest sources of income. Consumer focused software seems to be on the decline, and for the first time I'm wondering if this is due to large scale economic reasons.

ElvisTrout 4y ago
Marketing is very profitable. Sadly word of mouth is a painfully slow way to sell even a good product.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Marketing isn't the only example. Marketing does have an important purpose to play, as you say. Take for example Diablo Immortal. Blizzard and Diablo have tons of fans. People want an old school Diablo, a game that puts the player first, a game they can buy for a flat fee and then have and enjoy for decades like they have the others in the series. But Blizzard doesn't care, consumers can't pay enough to make it worth their while, so instead they'll deliver a thin veil over gambling and exploitation and call it Diablo Immortal.

happytiger 4y ago

Wait until they start sending CDs…

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Safari is the most private mainstream browser IMO. Private relay, third party tracking blockers, good enough support for 1Blocker to keep my laptop fan down. I use brave for work though since it’s closest to chrome and the dev tools are better. Their slightly annoying shenanigans every few months still seem better than Google having a high quality data stream directly from the browser itself

_9hey 4y ago

What I don’t understand is how their vendor even got the names of the recipients. That is the violation of privacy, the mailed letters are only the symptom of a poorly designed system.

gruez 4y ago
It seems conceivable that the vendor doesn't have the address/name list, but USPS.

Animats 4y ago

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-piece-mail-us-shares-agencies-request-it-280614 https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pi...

VanTheBrand 4y ago
No it didn’t. Read the article. They sent this to entire zip codes. It’s not targeted at users. If you are a user and you also got it, that’s a coincidence. All your neighbors in the same zip code also got it whether they are users or not,
- Animats 4y ago
  Then why does their mailing piece say "New Brave User"? Their spin control says they sent it to entire zip codes. Is there independent confirmation of that?
  - gruez 4y ago
    > Then why does their mailing piece say "New Brave User"? You're reading too much into this. If you look at the other elements of the ad, it's clear that the purpose of the ad is to get you to install brave, which makes you a "new brave user".
  - VanTheBrand 4y ago
    So you think their plan was to send this to people who already signed up for…retention? Seems very unlikely. I’d imagine awareness is a much bigger problem vs retention for them at this stage. Also the rest of the copy doesn’t make much sense if this was the case. You clearly want it to be true that something nefarious is happening but all evidence points away from that.
jonathansampson 4y ago
The names and addresses are with the USPS. Brave (hello, I'm a team engineer) used the EDDM offering of the United States Postal Service. We were attracted to this method of advertising in part because it never exposes sensitive information to us at Brave. User data, instead, is with the USPS, which has legitimate claim over such information. As stated in our blog post, we sent only the artwork (for the mailer itself), and the Zip Codes we aimed to reach. That's it. We also asked that names NOT be printed, which was the case for earlier batches (e.g. https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588). I hope this helps!

jrochkind1 4y ago

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.

Amezarak 4y ago
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 have to be addressed, or they cannot be mailed. The vendor Brave used to print the mailers included the resident's name, which is typical but not mandatory. Some people saw this and got freaked out, thinking that Brave was tracking them or had bought their data, the implicit thought being it was from some company dedicated to that. Instead, the USPS just used the USPS EDDM program that anyone can use. Brave apologized, destroyed the unsent mailers, and reprinted new ones without names. Basically, it looked bad to some people, but it's not clear to me that Brave did anything bad except from a publicity perspective. Most people regularly get such mailers through the same program. (Someone else says in this thread that they don't get them, but they also mention having a PO Box, which is a filter in the EDDM tool most people are going to use.) The EDDM program website is here, and it walks you through the process: https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm You choose a vendor to print your mailers: https://printerdirectory.usps.com/listing/#/ https://printerdirectory.usps.com/listing/#/ Likely Brave did not communicate to their printer vendor the necessity of not printing names. But the vendor has them anyway. It's possible through the EDDM program to see your physical mail pieces (if you're doing the drop off), so hypothetically I suppose Brave could have collected this information.
- jonathansampson 4y ago
  We did communicate our desire to exclude names from mailers; you can see an example from last month at https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588. Because we wish not to be exposed to any user data, our QA process ends prior to the stage where names would be printed. Once we learned names had been printed on a recent batch (a deviation from previous batches), we took prompt action to "halt and catch fire," so to speak.

ozten 4y ago

I don't envy the job of Brave marketers. Brave's "champion customers" are often people that hate any form of marketing, so every experiment risks alienating these key early adopters.

freediver 4y ago
Hm, what would motivate people who hate any form of marketing to use a browser that mainly depends on ads for revenue?

100xdang 4y ago

lobocinza 4y ago

Brave is Chrome with more hypocrisy.