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Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 5 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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aphextron ◴[21 Dec 18 19:26 UTC] No.18735814[source]▶
I'd been really loving Brave and using it as my daily driver for a few months now, until that I noticed that little "Brave Ads" icon at the end of the address bar. That's when I realized their entire business model is just in the usurpation of existing Google ad revenue, dressed up with "privacy concerns" for the good PR. This sent me on a journey to find a really solid, free, Chromium based browser that is totally de-Googled, which seems absolutely impossible. I've tacitly settled on Vivaldi, but it's just impossible to really know if they are trustworthy as a company in the long run. Ultimately I feel like I can only trust a browser who's entire build process is open source at this point.
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bscphil ◴[21 Dec 18 22:55 UTC] No.18737438[source]▶
My understanding is that you're experiencing Brave's other project, which is somehow both more scammy and scummy than this one. The idea is to replace the ads already in the web page with "good ads" approved by Brave, and give the original publisher 1/3 of the resulting revenue through some similarly unclear means.

This, of course, is exactly the same model as many pieces of toolbar malware, with the genius addition that by letting publishers opt in to receiving a small fraction of the revenue, they hope to make it easier to accept the loss than to sue.

Of course they'll respond by saying that users choose to download and run Brave. But the long term financial success of the project is dependent on most users either not knowing or not caring that their browser is inserting ads into webpages and taking funding from publishers (and maybe "opt-in" to seeing replacements ads through some UI dark patterns, I don't know). Frankly I don't see any real difference between this and the average toolbar that promises to "add value" to the browser.

Brave has the worst business practices of any open source company I know of, and they're a blight on the community in general.

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brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 04:45 UTC] No.18744481[source]▶
Brave doesn't insert ads into the browser or otherwise replace web site ads. This is a thing people like to say about the company because it'd be obviously lame if we did this...but we don't do this. Do you have a citation for the claims that Brave does this?
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bscphil ◴[23 Dec 18 04:58 UTC] No.18744525[source]▶
If that's not what your Wikipedia page means, then it could hardly be more misleading.

"Brave Software has announced that it is developing a feature allowing users to opt in to receiving ads sold by the company in place of ads blocked by the browser.[8][9][10] Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue."

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1. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 05:06 UTC] No.18744552[source]▶
"in place of" is not correct. We're not replacing any ads in the browser. We are building a completely separate ad platform into Brave that will go live in 2019 but calling it a replacement for blocked ads is an inaccurate, weird construction. Not sure who wrote that wikipedia entry. The 55% number is not accurate either.
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2. bscphil ◴[23 Dec 18 05:18 UTC] No.18744584[source]▶
Could you explain what you mean by "a completely separate ad platform"? My understanding is that Brave's model is to block all native ads with tracking, and in the place on the site where that ad would normally be shown, to show an ad from Brave's own network. Is that accurate? If so, I think "replacement" is a very accurate label.

And here's a bit from Ars Technica's initial review of Brave:

"In practice, Brave just sounds like a cash-grab. Brave isn't just a glorified adblocker: after removing ads from a webpage, Brave then inserts its own programmatic ads. It sounds like these ads will be filled by ad networks that work with Brave directly, and Brave will somehow police these ads to make sure they're less invasive/malevolent than the original ads that were stripped out. In exchange, Brave will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue. Instead of using tracking cookies that follow you around the Internet, Brave will use your local browsing history to target ads."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil...

Is that inaccurate? Was that accurate at some point in the past? I don't deny that I could be wrong and misunderstanding what Brave is trying to do, but I would posit that I have done due diligence here. This does seem to be the idea the neutral tech media has of Brave, like it or not.

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3. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 05:40 UTC] No.18744640[source]▶
We're building a way for users to opt into getting a few ads a day in the form of device push notifications (alerts in the top right of your monitor etc). We're not injecting ads into the HTML of sites visitors view. So yes, we're doing ad stuff, but we're not "replacing" the ads that we're blocking. Does the distinction make sense?

To your point about the Ars Technica comments, my understanding of things from conversations since I've joined in July 2018 is that when Brave launched, they put out a lot of info about stuff they were _going_ to do, and one of those ideas was to replace ads. However soon after launch, a lot of folks in the company and outside of the company explained to management that this was a really stupid idea and would be scummy. So Brave never went forward with it though it was a talking point to journalists early on. You could argue that having an idea to do a scummy thing two years ago is very bad. I'd like to think it's good when startups listen to feedback and adjust their product plans accordingly.

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4. pull_my_finger ◴[23 Dec 18 06:40 UTC] No.18744799{3}[source]▶
> when Brave launched, they put out a lot of info about stuff they were _going_ to do, and one of those ideas was to replace ads

So it's not exactly a baseless claim. I think between that ad idea, and this donation scam, I would _never_ use Brave nor recommend it to anyone. On top of that, it is blood boiling to watch you sit here and try to defend this scheme as a "UI problem" over and over again.

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5. brandnewlow ◴[23 Dec 18 07:25 UTC] No.18744916{4}[source]▶
No it is a baseless claim. Brave's never replaced ads and has no plans to do so. And yes, this was a UI mistake that's being fixed as quickly as we can to address valid concerns from users.