Brave is sending unsolicited targeted ads to the homes of privacy enthusiasts

I’ve been tempted to try Brave in the past, as Chromium based browsers are occasionally necessary, but now I’m really glad I didn’t bother. Every time I looked at it something just didn’t sit right with me. It felt like they were trying to hard and it was a trap… maybe I was just paranoid.

I read the details from Reddit about them just mailing based on a zip code, but the whole concept of personalized mailings seems to fly in the face of their mission. They could have just had “Current Resident” if they wanted to blanket a whole zip code. Using a person’s name seems like a needless privacy invading step.

Even without names, direct mail marketing is a huge turn off. I’ve had offers from State Farm follow me to 15 different addresses. I get something from them at least once a month. I have never been a customer and their mailings have cemented that I will never be their customer. Brave’s actions here have had the same effect, and they didn’t even need to mail me directly. There is no bigger turnoff than being the source of my junk mail. They clearly need a new marketing team.

TLDR: Brave asked USPS to send out a mass physical mail ad to folks in a specific set of US zip codes. The “New User” message is a mishap from the marketing team; Brave themselves did not collect or purchase any user data to serve the advertisement to any specific person(s).

To play devil’s advocate here; while ideologically it’s sort of backwards from a privacy standpoint (utilizing USPS for using non-anonymized user data), I understand how difficult it really is to market a new browser for non-technical users where a similar advertisement of whom it would likely never reach online. To gain and keep the trust of informed users alongside average joes though, I do hope that in the future a more anonymous method is used to acquire eyes on the product than delegating the non-private business to third-party vendors.

Here’s the exact responses from Brave rep on the explainer Reddit thread.

> I want to stress that Brave didn't buy any data. Not even anonymous data. We sent these mailers through the United States Postal Service. They have names and addresses, but none of that makes its way back to Brave (by design; we don't want any user data). We don't even want names printed on the mailers; we've asked (and will stress again) that this not happen.

> This is understandable confusion, likely due to the "New Brave User" message. In reality, these were mailed only to residents living within certain target cities. Brave gives the USPS a zip code, and that's it. The "New Brave User" wording, I'm told, is not uncommon in marketing. Personally, I find it a bit confusion as it seems to imply the recipient is already a Brave user (which we do not know to be the case). I hope this helps to clear up any confusion!

Surprised they didn't mention their cryptocurrency on the cards.

The hits just keep on coming with brave. I would never use this browser. Everytime it's in the headlines it's always some kind of blundered attempt at innovating monetization and basically everyone else on the internets expense. All under the guise of a privacy-first browser. No thanks.