Regarding Rewards Support (PLEASE READ)

Dear Brave Community,

As you may have noticed, some Community threads surrounding Ads have become “unlisted” on the forum, and you may have even seen a DM you sent one of us get deleted. We’d like to provide some context around these actions, to clear up any worries.

What was the issue?

Prior to the release of Brave stable version 1.11.101, there was an issue where the brave://rewards-internals Logs page contained too much information, some of which could lead to loss of funds if it fell into the wrong hands. **This additional information was noticed thanks to user hihouhou on HackerOne and a fix was released shortly thereafter to remove the sensitive data from the logs. However, this also forced us to think about how these logs and other sensitive information often required to resolve Rewards issues ought to be collected and processed.

Up until this point, the process was to essentially assess a user’s support request on Community (or other social platforms) and, if necessary, request that the users send us a private message containing their brave://rewards-internals information, often including their internals Logs. We would then look through those direct messages, match the user to the thread, and pass the information to the appropriate teams for further investigation.

As our user base has grown, we realized that this does not scale well. It can be hard to stay organized, ensure that everyone’s information is sent securely, while maintaining a reasonable turnaround time for Rewards/Ads issues.

What are we doing to improve this process?

Since fixing the above-mentioned issue with Logs data, the team has been discussing how to best move forward with collecting user information for technical support. We’ve come up with a plan that we think will be effective, but will require some downtime. Our current plan moving forward is to:

  1. Stop collecting brave://rewards-internals log data (specifically) through any medium:
    It is for this reason that you may have seen certain threads set to “Unlisted” or a DM you sent to a member of the Support team get deleted. In short, we needed to halt the old process so that users would not continue to send us their information, and to remove any potentially sensitive data we may have had stored anywhere. This policy will continue moving forward.

    • Note: This applies to logs data specifically. The Support team may still ask you for your brave://rewards-internals wallet ID/data (General info tab). This is because the information is safe to give (privately).
  2. Implement a single, official place for users to submit Logs data securely:
    With all this said, we will still need to collect Logs data in order to resolve a number of Rewards issues, particularly those related to Brave Ads. As such, we are creating an official page for users to upload their Logs data safely and securely. The goal is to eventually have any/all Rewards data submitted there (wallet info, logs or otherwise), and to eliminate the need for Support to sift through individual DMs/threads. We are working hard to get this implemented as soon as possible and will inform everyone once it’s ready.

    • Note: While we work on implementing an official path for users to upload their data, we are putting a temporary “hold” on resolving support issues that require logs data. We understand that this is not ideal and that many users will have to wait to get their issues resolved, but we believe that this temporary wait is preferable to requesting/receiving data in a manner that is anything less than 100% secure. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding. We anticipate development time to only be a couple weeks or less.

So what do I do while I wait?

We understand that having to sit and wait while your issue goes unresolved can be frustrating. Please know that we are working hard to have this new flow implemented as soon as possible and do not want to have users continue to wait any longer than absolutely necessary.

To help us move forward with this new process as smoothly as possible, keep an eye out for:

  • Users who have not yet seen this post and are unaware of the incoming changes – point them to this post to help keep everyone informed.
  • Users who are telling others to send Brave team members their Logs information – if you see someone disseminating this, please tag me (@mattches), @Aa-ron, @steeven-AWAY-AUG17, or @eljuno so we can remove the post and inform the user of these changes.
  • Users who are posting ANY brave://rewards-internals information (wallet info, logs, anything) publicly on any public platform – you should never share this information publicly for any reason. Once again, please tag me (@mattches), @Aa-ron, @steeven-AWAY-AUG17, or @eljuno if you see this.
  • Please ensure you are running the most up to date version of the browser – especially those of you who have a version prior to v1.11.101, since the sensitive data will still be present in your logs.

We have also created a new FAQ surrounding commonly asked Rewards issues and what steps you can take to troubleshoot them before having to open a thread and reach out to the team. The link for this is below, along with other resources that may be useful for issues with Brave Rewards/Ads:

Again, thank you for your patience and understanding. And most of all, thank you for being part of the Brave community.

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