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From the second paragraph:

> Since 2020, Brave has been experimenting with direct mail via the United States Postal Service’s Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) program. EDDM allows businesses in the US to create and distribute mailers to addresses across one or more ZIP Codes.

I'm not sure where you got "tracking" from, but they're just sending mail to every address in a zip code.

While this is true, it doesn’t help the optics from a customer point of view. Granted the number of people in a zip code who just download Brave will be small, but those are your new customers and will be freaked out. They will tell their friends. People who are learning about Brave from the mailing will question how Brave got their info to mail them (even if that isn’t reality) and see the mailing as not respecting their privacy, thus killing their message.

This whole idea was simply bad. Billboards, TV, and stadium advertisements would have gone over much better if they wanted some old-school methods. It gets in front of a lot of people with no questions about privacy or targeting involved.

> Marketing is a necessity but if you sacrifice one of the core principals of your product i.e. privacy & security, what's the point?

Because that is not even remotely the case as is clearly stated in the article in the first few sentences.

The fact that they have to explain themselves with an article speaks a lot. Was this specific method necessary? I am sure it cost them quite a bit and were the results worth it?

How many people would read the article? How many people would simply run away from Brave due to this? How many people would care to research it a bit more?

Privacy is such a sensitive topic for privacy-respecting people that most of the time even a little doubt blows up the ship. This was a huge risk taken by Brave and unnecessarily so because they didn't do anything extraordinary by sending people mail.

Moreover, can this one article stop the negative sentiment from spreading? I don't think so.

> sacrifice one of the core principals

One of the more amusing principle/principal mixups I've seen. (Their principals must indeed be brave if this is a potential outcome).

Haha. Auto correct working its magic. Unfortunately, can't edit it out since its too late.

>Random person: recieves a physical mail right after installing Brave.

>Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data.

>Random person: how did you get my address then right after I literally installed Brave?

Can't you make the argument for any sort of ad? eg.

>Random person: sees a static banner ad[1] right after installing Brave.

>Brave: we are so so private and don't ever sell or use your data.

>Random person: how did you know to show me a brave ad right after I literally installed Brave?

Are you basically arguing that brave shouldn't advertise at all?

[1] static in the sense it's placed there by the publisher for all visitors, rather than through some sort of ad network

Brave is basically arguing that third party marketing-distribution networks which use personally identifiable information to target ads are bad.

I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that exposing that they do so via a third party marketing distribution network which uses personally identifiable information to target ads may have been a misstep without arguing that means they can't advertise at all

Particularly when the "but we don't see the personally identifiable information that the third party we paid used to advertise to you" applies to everyone paying Facebook or Google to show ads too...

> Brave is basically arguing that third party marketing-distribution networks which use personally identifiable information to target ads are bad.

>I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that exposing that they do so via a third party marketing distribution network which uses personally identifiable information to target ads may have been a misstep without arguing that means they can't advertise at all

But in this case there's no targeting involved? They just told the "third party marketing-distribution network" to send ads to every household within a given zip code.

This is a very interesting situation for privacy respecting products.

Say you want to advertise to your potential audience, what do you do? You have very few privacy respecting methods.

1. You go with passive advertising like billboards, TV ads, blog ads etc. Not particularly effective since you can't do it across the world.

2. You go with something like Google with a huge ad network. But if you go with Google...you are tapping into and making use of personal data of your very own privacy respecting people. In a way, you are feeding the beast.

Which method should such a product go with? Which method would conform with their privacy respecting model best? Which would bring in a lot of users?

Not all ads are bad. Not all ad networks are bad. Some, very few, do it ethically. I think Brave itself is one of those. But these networks are very, very small compared to Google.

At all time the temptation is there to go with targeted ads because it's the most effective & affordable way to get potential users. The moment you do, are you still privacy respecting?

Edit: as to your question about banner ads. It depends. If you are using Google's banner ads they aren't static by any means. Google targets and rotates based on their huge database of user data. But if you just put a banner ad somewhere on a blog etc, that comes under the category of passive/non-targeted marketing.

Lol the problem here is assuming privacy is one of braves main strengths or even goals. When it's not lol. Brave makes money off tracking you and exposing your data, not in keeping it private.

I work at Brave. We don't track you, or expose any data (we don't even have your data to begin with). Reputable researchers have found Brave to exist in a class of its own as the "most private" popular browser tested: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf.

Do they actually? I would be interested in reading some literature about this. How have they used/exposed/sold user's data?

I got one of these yesterday. I'm uninstalling Brave and going back to Firefox

Firefox, by default and out of the box, sends your keystrokes to Google. Brave asked the USPS to deliver a printed JPEG to people who live within your Zip Code (and you happened to get one as well). These two things are quite different in terms of privacy, security, and trust.