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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 2 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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plusCubed ◴[21 Dec 18 18:03 UTC] No.18735107[source]▶
Edit: title was changed, I am not Tom Scott

I am not too familiar with how Brave and BAT (Brave Attention Token), so please chime in. Here's how Brave describes the BAT YouTube donations system: https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attentio...

From my understanding, users of the Brave Browser select which YouTubers to donate to, but they don't know whether the channels have opted in to receive donations? What does Brave do with unclaimed donations? Someone pointed out this concern in an earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15730661

Furthermore, OP said that they might not be following GDPR due to collection of YouTuber data (to assign donations). IANAL, anyone know how compliant this is?

replies(2): >>18735736 #>>18736561 #
1. ecp9 ◴[21 Dec 18 19:15 UTC] No.18735736[source]▶
This is so weird, I keep meaning to check out the brave browser but knowing it's tied into cryptocoin nonsense drops my interest level to zero.
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2. rchaud ◴[21 Dec 18 21:34 UTC] No.18736864[source]▶
I agree, this is a terrible look for the company. They need to apologize, suspend the service and be honest with users about how this works, before announcing a reboot.

That being said, I've been using Brave on Android since early 2017, and it's been great. I don't think the BAT stuff is in the mobile version, but I did see it on the desktop Windows version recently.