Brave’s use of direct mailers

To me these little things are what turned me away from using the browser. Every time you install it somewhere you have to manually turn all the crypto ads off, it&#x27;s the only thing that doesn&#x27;t sync across devices.<p>These little nudges and &#x27;growth hacks&#x27; if you will including that mailing campaign is exactly what I don&#x27;t want in software that allegedly puts the user first. It doesn&#x27;t seem like there is genuine innovation in Brave, they still rely on ads, and sending people physical spam in the mail or showing you &#x27;privacy respecting&#x27; ones online obfuscated with a bunch of attention tokens doesn&#x27;t really change anything.

This little stunt by Brave was clearly not the right move. Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy &amp; security, what&#x27;s the point?<p>The scenario is something like this:<p>Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave.<p>Brave: we are so so private and don&#x27;t ever sell or use your data.<p>Random person: how did you get my address then right after I literally installed Brave?<p>Brave: you see, it&#x27;s very private because we can&#x27;t see the address or who the mail is going to go to. We just contracted a mailer who sent this marketing newsletter to everyone in their database.<p>Random person: ...<p>Brave: maybe you didn&#x27;t understand but we, the brave company, didn&#x27;t see who the mail would go to. That&#x27;s privacy right?<p>Random person: <i>deletes Brave</i><p>The problem here is that a privacy oriented company is accepting and making use of a very non-private method to spread privacy and Brave. Contradictory in it&#x27;s core.<p>I still like Brave and what they represent. I am a fan. They do a lot of things right but this was baffling. I don&#x27;t know how they could allow something like this to pass through the filter...

Why does this process involve printing addresses at all?<p>In Germany &quot;you&quot; (probably needs to be a company of some size) go to &quot;the post office&quot; (actual delivery probably directly to a distribution center), give them a stack of flyers, and say &quot;one of these into each mailbox in this ZIP code, please&quot;.<p>The mailman then takes a stack of said flyers and starts stuffing mailboxes as he goes along his route (excluding those mailboxes that have &quot;no ads&quot; stickers).<p>This avoids the need to treat the spam as addressed mail, because you don&#x27;t really care which person gets which of the (identical) flyer. This makes handling much easier and as a result, cheaper.

It seems like a weird mia culpa. If I’m understanding right, they’re not sorry for sending the mailers, or working with a data broker to get the addresses, just for the fact that names were printed on the envelopes? I wonder who is concerned about the last one that isn’t more concerned about the first two.

I have a cynical take on the prevalence of marketing in our society. This may not apply to Brave specifically, but while we&#x27;re on the topic of marketing:<p>I wonder if growing wealthy inequality means that consumers simply don&#x27;t have enough wealth to make honest exchanges worth while. The powers-that-be look for ways to &quot;grow&quot; and consider making an honest product and simply selling it, but the common people don&#x27;t have enough wealth to give in exchange for an honest product, so instead they put their money into advertising and other &quot;growth&quot; efforts.<p>Brave may be an example of this, what if consumers simply don&#x27;t have enough wealth to finance the development of an honest consumer focused browser? In that case you would expect to see companies like Brave, even if their intentions are good, turning to less honest sources of income.<p>Consumer focused software seems to be on the decline, and for the first time I&#x27;m wondering if this is due to large scale economic reasons.

I would take quite a bit of tracking in exchange for no more junk mailers like this. They seem to be missing the forest for the trees: sure tracking is problematic, but Annoying Ads, however you define them, have always been the biggest pain point. Whether it’s popups, popunders, interstitials, autoplaying, made to look like news, or killing trees to fill your mailbox: we’ve always been at war with annoying ads.<p>This seems like an indication Brave is actually out of touch with what consumers want: less obnoxious ads. They’re so focused on tracking they’re willing to annoy people with junk mail.

I trust that Brave doesn&#x27;t have a database with residents&#x27; names and addresses, but the problem with the marketing stunt, is that the moment they have to explain that it&#x27;s not actually nefarious, they&#x27;ve already lost.<p>It&#x27;s like making a misleading advertisement, but instead of misleading the users to trust them, it shocked the potential user base into a false sense of insecurity.

I like Brave.<p>But they always seem to be &quot;asking forgiveness rather than permission&quot;.

I would be very suspicious of mail coming from a company that touted privacy that had my name on it. Especially if I&#x27;ve never done business with them.<p>Brave is in a weird market. Unless you pay for it, you&#x27;re still the product.<p>The best thing Brave or Mozilla could do would be to legislatively kill Chrome (and perhaps the iOS Safari-only policy).<p>With control of browsers out of the hands of advertising agencies (Google), these companies could then raise their rates on an acceptable ads program sans the tracking. More revenue, sustainable market, and better for the world.

Safari is the most private mainstream browser IMO. Private relay, third party tracking blockers, good enough support for 1Blocker to keep my laptop fan down. I use brave for work though since it’s closest to chrome and the dev tools are better. Their slightly annoying shenanigans every few months still seem better than Google having a high quality data stream directly from the browser itself

So physical spam is their scaling plan?

Clearly someone from AOL has slipped into management.

I don’t know if it was coincidence but I got two mailers the same week after I downloaded brave into my laptop, It freaked me out to think they already knew my address by just installing the browser. I hope everyone learns from this and use other methods of marketing for companies that market themselves as privacy first.

I don&#x27;t envy the job of Brave marketers. Brave&#x27;s &quot;champion customers&quot; are often people that hate any form of marketing, so every experiment risks alienating these key early adopters.

What I don’t understand is how their vendor even got the names of the recipients. That is the violation of privacy, the mailed letters are only the symptom of a poorly designed system.

I feel like the criticism towards Brave ITT is unjustified. This is a USPS service which is available to businesses. If you&#x27;re a privacy conscious person in the US, you&#x27;ve likely opted out of this list.<p>Brave is reaching the people who may not have done this, to the end of getting regular folks to know their alternatives against big tech companies.<p>I guess don&#x27;t get the ire, or what the expectation is for them to grow. Would you rather them take out Google or Facebook ads? &#x2F;s

Wait what?<p>I&#x27;m really confused about what was going on here, what was the nature of the alleged mistake, and why it was a mistake or bad.

Since the outside of all US mail is imaged and stored by the USPS and shared with other government agencies, [1] Brave just gave its user list to the US Government.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;postal-service-photographs-every-piece-mail-us-shares-agencies-request-it-280614" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;postal-service-photographs-every-pi...</a>

Brave is Chrome with more hypocrisy.

Crikey brave really come across like the telemarketing products of yesteryear. Kinda looks useful from the outside, but doesn&#x27;t actually do anything better mostly just worse than all the optio a you had before.<p>Lol the only people I&#x27;ve encountered in the wild who had brave on their systems were folks here in Aus who were deep down the rabbit hole of American Christian right wing nut job conspiracy theories, like full maga supporting fruit loops.

Wait until they start sending CDs…

Once again reinforcing my initial vibe of Brave being sketchy as shit.