33
votes
Tom Scott warns viewers that Brave donations do not reach him
@tomscott:
This warning is prompted by a company called Brave, who've been taking cryptocurrency donations "for me", using my name and photo, without my consent. I asked them not to, and to refund anyone who's donated; they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible".
Body of tweets for anyone adverse to going to twitter:
Brave always gave off an untrustworthy vibe. Guess this is fairly concrete proof it should be avoided.
No, you don't understand the complaint. I have been aware of Brave since day 1. I know how their "platform" works. That doesn't mean this shit is in anyway OK.
You can't use someone's name, photo and web presence and collect "donations" in their name without their explicit consent. This is fraud. It's illegal in most and unethical in all countries.
So is the language they use implying the money is being paid directly to the creator when it is not.
Why are they collecting payments on behalf of someone before that someone has even consented to allow them to? Even if Brave doesn't pocket the unclaimed donations themselves and so "it just sits there indefinitely", that still seems incredibly unethical, especially if Brave is receiving any monetary benefits in the process (e.g. transaction fees or even inflating the BATs value).
And even if Brave chooses to keep the system the way it is, if someone explicitly tells them to stop collecting any/all "donations" on their "behalf", at the very least Brave should have a way to disable them and refund the already collected payments.
@heady below mentioned that Liberapay has a similar system but at least seems to do it the ethical way; You can send money to someone but you won't actually be charged until the person on the receiving end actually accepts it.
It is to solve the chicken and egg problem of needing donors for creators to signup and creators for donors to signup.
Solution is to crawl websites and social media accounts to procedurally generate something for donors to browse then dangle the donations in front of the creators to have them signup.
Brave then goes a step further and holds actual funds hostage.
And yet the fact that is still a possibility is extremely worrying, IMO, since many people may have been essentially swindled and the creator they wanted to donate to received nothing.
So do I, but not if this is the model with which we do it and Brave the unethical company we do it through. I use Patreon for essentially that purpose and they have their faults but at least they aren't shady AF like Brave and Eich are.
You pay for BAT tokens, currently, and Brave takes 5% for processing them. Incredibly scummy, and @calcifer and @cfabbro are right, they do profit off of it. Hence "no refunds."
So they don't make interest on the money that's just sitting there indefinitely?
Why is it okay to mislead people into donating money that they think is going to a content creator they enjoy, when the money is actually just sitting there indefinitely?
This isn't actually better.
I'm still personally kind of unsure about Brave overall, but this is one of the main reasons why I set up Tildes to be able to receive these tokens, at least.
Like he says, they're going to collect them anyway and make it seem like they're making it to me, so I'd rather have that be true.
This seems conceptually similar to liberapays's pledges where they automatically recognise creators based on github pages etc and allow you to pledge a donation that can be claimed later.
However Liberapay has demonstrated the respectable way to conduct this approach by not actually accepting the funds until after the recipient has opted in.
I suppose this is another example of the influence of venture capitol (brave) has on practices in comparison to non profits (liberapay),
In the US, it's very illegal to collect money for someone or some "charity" then not give that money to them.
Some registered collection entities are allowed to take a fee for that service, but they must give something to the subject of their collection.
The Hacker News comment thread about this is a pretty good read as well, there are some interesting points being made in there, and at least one Brave employee responding.
Found something rather interesting in that HN thread:
[emphasis mine]
Apparently the unclaimed money doesn't just "sit there indefinitely", @SpaceAttorney. That is shady AF if true.. :/
EDIT: Although according to Eich "user funds" are held indefinitely and it's only "grants" that can be "recycled"... which I assume means the "free" tokens they give to users to spend can be reclaimed if unused but not the "donations"?
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1076198964607610880
New rewards update.
With the new update, when you tip unverified person, small note will appear at the donation tab, telling you that the person has not signed up. New settings is added that is off by default and prevents you from donating to unverified people.
I don't think this is enough. The note is not visible enough and the option that doesn't allow you to tip unverified people should definitely be opt-out, and not hidden somewhere in settings.
The fact the feature preventing people from "donating" to unverified people/sites is off by default says a LOT about Brave and how much they really care about the ethical concerns people expressed about all this, IMO.
And yeah I agree, the note is definitely not prominent enough, especially since our brains tend to automatically filter out elements like that for us since we are so used to seeing them. A reasonably sized pop-up before you donate to an unverified user would be better... or even better still, don't even allow "tips" at all until people/sites have actually given their consent to take money on their behalf!!!
I am also still concerned by their language use since it's intentionally vague and implies the creator will be paid when that is not necessarily the case since the funds are essentially held in escrow and there exists the distinct possibility that some (let's be honest, MOST) creators are likely to never receive the money.
p.s. Have they stopped scraping people's profile pics to include in their little "tips" overlay? I can't really tell from that pic but it certainly seems like they still are.
JavaScript, Prop 8, and now Brave The Fishy Browser. Brendan Eich is such a great guy, isn't he?
Look I'm no fan of Eich but this comment is just noise. Taking 3 random things he did and saying "Isn't he such a great guy?!" is lame and doesn't actually say anything about anyone except yourself…
Brave is an initiative to tackle an actual problem, with an actual solution. Very few other people on the web are doing that. In fact the only other non-obscure initiative I'm aware of to fix the ad problem on the web is Google Contributor, and Google isn't necessarily the company you want "fixing ads".
His prop 8 stuff is shit. But I know a lot of shit people who can produce great products. Palmer Luckey is an excellent example: How shit of a human he is doesn't reflect on the Oculus' quality.
As for JavaScript, that's his crowning achievement, he created the most popular language on the planet. JavaScript changed the world and pushed us forward leaps and bounds. Your comment reeks of "but JS sucks!", but the thing is so what. Could have been better in a different world. We're not there. Eich's creation changed billions of lives, whereas your perfectly-engineered Github project reached exactly seven people.
You take the good with the bad with most people. Trying to make Eich "fit" into this evil bad guy character just doesn't fucking work. Some people are genuinely evil, or default to bad, but these are rare and it's fucking tiresome to see the media, the news etc always paint people with these "always bad" or "always good" brushes. So don't do it either, please.
Instead let's evaluate Brave as is. The technology, and this tweet. I'd also like to understand more about what's happening here. It sounds fishy and has me worried, but I still have no idea what's going on.
For those who don't know, He used to be the CEO of mozilla until he donated a large amount of money to make same sex marriage illegal in California (Prop 8).
That's misleading. He was the CEO for a short period before stepping down. That was a result of internal company pressure due to said donation.
Isn't that basically what I said?
It's worth making the distinction that he was not the head of Mozilla at the time of the donation. That happened years earlier.
Sure, he wasn't the Mozilla Corporation CEO when he made the donation but he was their CTO, and also a Mozilla Foundation co-founder as well as a member of their Board of Directors at the time. It's not like he was completely unaffiliated with Mozilla when he made the donation.
That's fair.