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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Just looking at the original title, I knew this was going to be a twitter post by a Brave employee posting either hearsay, or something taken out of context.

Private browsing is a small niche, and Brave does their best to drive competitors at every turn, and not by being obviously better at it. Kinda scummy, if I’m honest.

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Was forever turned off Brave when they sent me direct mail advertisements (for a privacy focused browser lol). They bought my info from some list and spammed me with postcard ads.

Mail or Email? If its email every company does that, including DDG.

I've never gotten an unsolicited e-mail ad from DDG. And for every half-serious company which does send unsolicited e-mail ads, at least I know I'm the one who gave them my e-mail address. If people are getting e-mail ads from Brave without ever having disclosed their e-mail address to Brave, that's seriously concerning.

I'm not saying brave does unsolicited emails, just asking which one.

Snail mail.

A physical postcard:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/utgukp/i...

Sending unsolicited e-mail advertisements are explicitly illegal in my country and companies that do that could loose the right to exist.

It should also be mentioned that using private information for unsolicited advertisements is something which is likely in conflict with GDPR.

"Privacy" focused users are the most monolithic demographic and the easiest to target in the history of all demographics.

It's just as easy as selling bunker-beds and ammo for doomer-preppers (while stroking their ego).

But, shhh don't tell them and hurt their ego

It's interesting for me to imagine explaining this comment to a person in 1995

At the very least I think it relegates people to buckets of either "People who believe tin foil hats give them privacy", and normal people.

Either way I don't think it's a productive dichotomy.

I started recommending their mobile browser to everyone I know, because of how well it blocks pop-ups on the phone.

It was sent to every postal customer on your mail route, not targeted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/utgukp/i...

> Just looking at the original title, I knew this was going to be a twitter post by a Brave employee posting either hearsay, or something taken out of context.

This HN submission links to a tweet by a Brave employee. However, that tweet is just a screenshot of replies to the thread at https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072 written by a researcher who doesn't appear to be a Brave employee. I think it would be better if the link were directly to the tweet by Zach Edwards instead.

Yeah, they probably should have.

By posting a screenshot, the poster removed all context. Even being charitable, it's not a good luck for Brave.

> By posting a screenshot, the poster removed all context.

I was really talking about this HN submission, not the tweet. That person's Twitter account only has 600 followers.

Agreed. All this post did for me is make me think even less of Brave. It hasn't really changed my opinion of DDG. For the majority of DDG users (like me) who only use it for search, this changes nothing. All it does is make the Brave folks look like mudslingers.

So you're okay with a company promising you privacy (core of their marketing) is in fact willing to instantly change for a Microsoft paycheck?

What you're actually upset about is that someone pointed out their hypocrisy?

I was promised tracking-free web searches, which has not been violated, though the Brave employee who tweeted this clearly meant to imply that it was. I don't use their web browser and I don't care to. But the original tweet is out of context and deliberately misleading and was posted by a competitor to DDG and so was clearly done in bad faith.

I don't think it's great that Microsoft is exempt from some restrictions in the DDG browser, but this tweet is also referencing a post by a DDG employee freely disclosing the issue and stating that they're working to improve it. In my opinion, this sort of mudslinging makes the folks at Brave look petty while not really changing my opinion of DDG very much. I also think this is a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Feel free to continue to tell me how I feel about things, though, internet stranger. You're clearly much more in tune with my opinions than I am.

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