Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

Brendan Eich answers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076187316748615680

basically he plans to keep it working the way it works now, "opt out" and all - he's confident this is a completely legal way to work

> I realize some don’t like it, agree we should respect their wishes. But the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists and is not illegal or unethical. Nominative fair use of public data also legal.

There's a huge difference between sending someone money without their prior permission and creating a system to solicit money to send to someone without their prior permission.

I think this "growth hacking" will spectacularly backfire and destroy the company. It's 2018, this stuff doesn't fly anymore. And as the tweeter pointed out, it's breaks the GDPR in Europe. Disaster.

Just realized I didn't know this: how are you supposed to comply with GDPR if your clients are partially anonymous?

His tweet says, in part

> "... Tom has a point, we should let creators say "no thanks" and be auto-excluded. Users may already auto-exclude unverified sites/channels. We will work on this."

This makes your interpretation disingenuous, or uncharitable at best.

> the ability to paypal or western union or otherwise send to people without their consent exists

Surely the recipient has to create a PayPal or Western Union account first, which constitutes giving permission for that company to take payment on their behalf.

And in fairness, the complaint isn't even that money is being sent to people without their consent. The problem is that the money isn't actually being sent to those people at all — Brave are keeping it.

That's not how Western Union works. The recipient goes to WU and presents matching ID.

I assume you're talking about the user requests regarding their data? Well, if the data is so anonymized that even the person can't prove who they are, then I'd say it falls in the provision that exempts anonymized data.

But in this case, I'm assuming the user must have a private key (for signing BAT transactions), so they could build a feature in the browser to sign messages using it.

The problem with signing transactions is basically then you can identify the browser history of the user. The BAT-ledger explains the principles of the transaction system

https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-ledger/blob/master/documen...

The current process is the data is anonymized and then sent out for privacy reasons.

He is missing the point though.

It shouldn't be opt-out, it should be opt-in -- if the purpose is to give donations to creators then surely those creators should agree to receive donations (especially since donations have to be included in tax filings and so on).

For "donations to a creator" to be used for a different purpose by the party that is mediating donations appears (to a non-lawyer like me) to be some kind of charity fraud.

What kind of inane rationale is that? Western Union asks the sender to provide detailed address and contact information, and has technology available to send a text to the recipient letting them know that they can pick up their money at a WU location.

Since Tom Scott didn't sign up, how would Brave know to contact him? Some default webmaster@example.com email that may or may not even be registered?

Western Union doesn't claim to be accepting donations on creators behalfs.

Western Union can refund money sent if it hasn't been collected by the recipient.

Western Union doesn't require a minimum amount of money be sent to a recipient before they collect.

Really, it is 1 & 2 together that seem to mark this clearly as fraud. 3 doesn't help either.

I've never used WU, but I'm guessing that they don't divert all payments that go unclaimed for 90 days into their advertising budget.

>>Western Union doesn't claim to be accepting donations on creators behalfs.

Strictly speaking, Brave is not doing that. The fact that the originator of the solicitation is Brave, and that the potential end-recipient may not sign up to receive the funds, is disclosed.

It's an escrow fund that would release the funds to a particular party should they choose to claim it. That's how the contribution service is marketed.

Brendan talked to a bunch of us on the team and we're rolling out a bunch of hotfixes tomorrow that address most of the valid concerns people have raised: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

As stated in the post, we're also going to talk about whether Brave users should be able to even try to send tips to unverified creators at all.