Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

If this person doesn't want his donations, or wants people to donate to some fund against malaria, I'm sure Brave can figure out how to redirect his funds to another donation site of his choice as a feature.

Brave's attempt to find a new way to pay content creators (and, sure, insert themselves into the process) seems to be in good faith. And I'll admit that the complaints are mostly in good faith too, especially that there should be a feature to opt-out, or there should be a way to receive your funds automatically (I'm surprised and don't 100% believe that there is not).

But the complaints and arguments saying this is "fraud" seem to be in bad faith. There's no evidence that these donations are completely irretrievable from the creators they were intended to go toward. Stop emotionally throwing around the word "fraud" as if there's criminal intent here for Brave to keep every penny of donations, zero intent to ever make that money available to the intended recipients.

Let's be clear - you cannot start collecting donations on someone's behalf without their consent and expect them to be happy when they find out. Especially when the person you are donating to is a business person with their own public image that they have to maintain and especially when you act shifty about actually handing over the money. Brave might be a great group of people with fantastic intentions, but their behaviour here is identical to someone committing identity theft.

Generally, crime has two components: the act or omission itself (actus reus) and the intention to do so (mens rea). What's missing from this formula is whether you did so from pure or impure motives. That might influence a jury or be factored in a judgement, but into itself doesn't change whether you committed a crime.

Assuming there is some jurisdiction where this particular arrangement is potentially criminal, what will matter is not why Brave intended to do it. What will matter is that they intended to do it.

> identical to someone committing identity theft

I don't fully understand what you mean here. Are they attempting to take out loans or credit cards for their own use with this person's information, resulting in potentially ruinous consequences for this person's credit? Rhetorical question in that case, but really, I'd like to understand what you mean.

Is it in reference to your first sentence? My assumption is that people using the Brave browser or extension (I don't know how it works) would see these donation solicitations on every blog and understand that they're (Brave) collecting donations on behalf of just about anyone, not some specific person they are pretending to be, and not in any sense where these people are opting in to their platform one-at-a-time.

The UX for donations does not say anything about "on behalf". Nor does it say that the person has not requested that. Nor does it say that the money won't actually go to that person unless and until they explicitly come and claim it. Nor does it say that the person isn't even notified until the total is over $100.

As far as consequences to the person - asking for donations in and of itself affects one's reputation.

Not our intent. We shipped some bad UI, got a bunch of deserved flack for it, and have hustled to fix things. Changes go live tomorrow and are detailed here: https://brave.com/rewards-update/

Thanks for caring about this done in a respectful, creator-first way.