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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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They didn't work with a data broker. You can pay the post office in the US to send your mailer to every single address in a given zip code. This sort of bulk mailing represents the majority of your junk mail.

Having worked in marketing, they absolutely worked with a data broker. You don't blindly send out mailers. You use data brokers to zone in on a target market. "This zip code is more like to buy X while this zip code is more like to buy Y."

All direct mail marketers do this, because it allows better targeting (& re-targeting old prospects & previous customers) but Brave explicitly said they didn't, and only went through the USPS's service.

The USPS didn’t mess up. They are clearly using some sort of vendor to send out the mail.

The USPS sells all the addresses themselves.

> data broker

If I'm understanding the EDDM tool correctly, the data broker appears to be the USPS.

Even if we accept that it's just about the names, it's a weird mea culpa. Obviously they knew the names, because they accidentally printed them. So what they're apologising for is making it so obvious that they knew the names, or, to put it another way, they're apologising for failing to provide the illusion of anonymity to people who were not anonymous at all.

For a privacy-focused browser, that is definitely odd.

Brave didn't do the printing; that is (and has been since 2020) handled by the EDDM vendor. Brave doesn't want any user data; we prefer that information to stay with the United States Postal Service, which has legitimate claim over such information.

Yeah, I don't get it either. Is there anybody who doesn't get this kind of mail at home addressed to them by name all the time?

Not from companies I've never interacted with, no.

I haven't done any of the extreme privacy things, but I do use a PO box for almost everything, and thus I really don't ever get anything addressed to my name sent to my actual residence.

Really? Because every time a new dentist office, grocery store, etc. opens up I get unsolicited mail from them to let me know they're now a thing in my neighborhood.

Does it bother me? Not in the slightest. It's a community notice, and the Brave thing would only annoy me if it hit the levels that AOL CDs were at in the 90s.

This is probably a very location-dependent experience. I had literal stacks of spam mail every single mail day when I lived in Springfield and Kansas City, almost zero spam mail over entire years when I lived in smaller Missouri cities, and nowadays get maybe ~1-2 spam pamphlets per month at most here in Portland.

Probably based on a mix of local laws and/or how profitable each city is to market to.

I get plenty of things like this addressed to the current resident of my house.

None of them are addressed to me personally by name.

Addresses are not secret. Printing the name with the address might seem like a privacy faux pas, but in actuality it's a mailing faux pas. If USPS knows you don't live there anymore, they return to sender. That's a lot of expensive postcards going around for nothing. If however, it is addressed to "current resident" it's not a problem.

The story seems like trying to make lemons into lemonade. "Well, we wasted money, but maybe we can get a bit of privacy protecting glow from this cock-up anyway."

I work at Brave. We don't get addresses; we don't want that type of data (we don't want any of your data). The addresses are printed after Brave's QA process has completed. We asked that names NOT be printed on the mailers, but have no way to verify that they were excluded, since that would expose sensitive user data to us (which we do not want). We didn't work with any data broker; we simply provided mailers and desired zip codes (for 7 cities) via the EDDM service.

Yip. The whole story is weird.

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