jonathansampson

7 ms·

1.
by jonathansampson 3mo ago
Brave engineer here. > "Monopoly money for watching ads" What does Firefox pay you for piping your keystrokes off to Google? BAT is a reward for your attention; far better arrangement and exchange than what has existed up to th
2.
by jonathansampson 4mo ago
Not quite. We had a couple domains that—when typed into the address bar—would offer a referral-option in the browser UI. If you quickly hit the enter key, you might mistakenly have selected one of those unintentionally. This was a UX bug on
3.
by jonathansampson 7mo ago
There's a lot of confusion around the "brave-reward holding garbage." To be brief, Brave issued grants to users, which those same users could then direct to their favorite content creators. So, the grants _started with Brave_
4.
by jonathansampson 7mo ago
In fact, Brave was the first browser to block nasty crypto-jacking/mining scripts (e.g., CoinHive) when they began to appear on the scene, nearly a decade ago.
5.
by jonathansampson 2y ago
Sampson here, from Developer Relations at Brave. Would you mind telling me a bit more about how you have Brave configured, so that I can make sure local testing and troubleshooting on my end reflects your scenario accurately? Any input woul
6.
by jonathansampson 2y ago
<transparency>I'm an engineer at Brave.</transparency> Not quite. Not unless by "stupid stuff" you mean shipped-and-fixed a couple bugs here and there (including confusing UI/UX), etc. Brave operates in
7.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
Brave published a blog post regarding this feature/news; you can read more (as well as see images of the feature in action) at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ . I hope this helps!
8.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
Hello! I am Sampson, from Brave. Brave is an advertising company, but we’re quite different from Google and others in this space. Brave's ad notifications are opt-in and engineered in such a way to protect and preserve user privacy. I&
9.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
I'm Sampson, from the Brave team. The Web Discovery Project is a clever approach. For Brave to compete with Google, and offer a truly novel index of the Web, a novel approach must be taken. The WDP is an opt-in, privacy-preserving appr
10.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
That was my bad :( I forgot the "w-full" class on the Shields image. I set the "max-w-md" class alone, which sounds like it's supposed to prevent the image from being wider than the viewport itself, but that isn&#
11.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
You can always check the internal task manager to see which tabs/extensions/child-processes are using the most resources. To do so, visit › More Tools › Task Manager in the browser, or press Shift+Esc.
12.
by jonathansampson 3y ago
In Brave, you can select the Bookmarks panel from the side bar, and then toggle it open/closed from then on with Ctrl+B. Regarding iOS, it's entirely possible there's a bug in our code. I'll definitely take a closer look
13.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
That's quite misleading; please see my response to a previous comment regarding the initial "payments" UI/UX: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755143 .
14.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
There's some considerable context missing here. When Brave held its token sale in 2017, we allocated 300M tokens to the User Growth Pool. Shortly thereafter we began staking Brave users with tokens to identify creators for whom they wo
15.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
The United States Postal Service handles mail for the United States. Them having my name and address is quite a bit different than Google having the same data (in addition to the mountains of other data-types Google tends to harvest). Switc
16.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
If any data is being collected and stored on servers, it would first need to be transferred off the installed client (the instance of Brave running on the user's device). Network analysis would capture this (as it does with Google, Bin
17.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
Data-harvesting would be quite difficult to hide given our source code is open to the public (i.e. https://code.brave.com and https://github.com/brave ), and that we encourage web-proxy evaluation of network acti
18.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
You've mischaracterized features of Brave. Our code is open-source, it's not difficult to literally "go to the source," ( https://code.brave.com and https://github.com/brave ) and test the clai
19.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
This was not an example of data-sharing; the data in question (names and addresses) resides with the United States Postal Service. That data is never accessed or viewed by Brave.
20.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
You're absolutely right; no-addresses is the ideal, and what we would have preferred over no-names from the beginning. We have a call this week to investigate further why addresses were included in the first place, and why our request
21.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
The names and addresses are with the USPS. Brave (hello, I'm a team engineer) used the EDDM offering of the United States Postal Service. We were attracted to this method of advertising in part because it never exposes sensitive inform
22.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
Brave never has access to your information. We didn't use "a service that collects data about people," we used the EDDM offering of the United States Postal Service, which has legitimate claim to names and addresses. This ser
23.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
No privacy impact. Brave doesn't have any names or addresses; those are with the United States Postal Service (never exposed to Brave). We asked that names NOT be printed on these mailers. Previous batches went out without names, as in
24.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
We did communicate our desire to exclude names from mailers; you can see an example from last month at https://twitter.com/TravelTechGuy/status/1513965348177219588 . Because we wish not to be exposed to any user da
25.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
Brave doesn't harvest or collect any user data; we explicitly requested that no names be printed on these mailers (which was the case prior to this recent batch). You're mistaken about the other issues as well (they are every bit
26.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
Not at all. EDDM doesn't impact user privacy. Brave never sees any user data during this process.
27.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
It's EDDM, and previous mailers lacked printed names. Our request to exclude printed names, while honored in the past, was not honored with a recent batch. Rather than brushing this off, we chose instead to investigate where the break-
28.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
Brave doesn't ask you to trust it with more and more data; we explicitly do not want any of your data. This issue did not impact user data or privacy in any way either.
29.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
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 ove
30.
by jonathansampson 4y ago
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 maile

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