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. Th

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.