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LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey (youtu.be)
submitted 6 months ago by lig@lemmings.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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"The biggest scam in YouTube history"

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[-] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Honey in the chrome webstore: 4.7 stars. With no clear way to see written reviews, just the aggregated stars are visible.

Honey in the firefox add-ons store: 3.2 stars.

Honey in Trustpilot: 2.7 stars. Closed for new reviews since 4 days, but old reviews and history are still accessible.

Google manages to do worse than trustpilot. Google is once again confirming what a useless company they've become.

[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 months ago

I don’t trust reviews at all at this point, from any service like those mentioned.

I will say that it’s diabolical that trust pilot closed the reviews. Meaning people can’t express there disappointment with the app, and that people might still trust it.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 months ago

Now that AI can write reasonably good-sounding copy, reviews are increasingly unreliable.

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Aside from the element of deception towards their sponsored creators, I wonder if this will set precedent for what is a relatively common practice.

https://sirlinksalot.co/affiliate-hijacking/

Honey isn't the only one doing this. Brave Browser does it too:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10134

[-] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Does or did? It's not clear from the link at first glance.

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They don't do it any more. Source: just checked.

Interesting how brave stills gets dragged through the mud for this, meanwhile firefox gets to walk free about the looking glass fiasco.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 0 points 6 months ago

You probably can't definitively say they don't just by isolated checking. There could be a lot at play here. Maybe they turned it off while the heat is on, maybe whatever affiliate you were looking at didn't actually have a matching affiliate link on their side. Maybe there's an a/b test where they only jack a certain percentage.

When Linus Tech Tips first took them out as a sponsor they didn't appear to be jacking then either. But it would be very simple to build a system that turned link jacking off for certain users or during certain times or at certain thresholds.

Brave got caught doing it, and then stopped because the backlash was going to be worse than the advantage. Brave still had plenty of other ways to make money via search, selling advertising and BAT. I honestly don't fault brave for trying that because they are funding significant development to block ads.

Honey's base business model probably falls apart without some linkjacking. You go to a website to buy something and it says no no go buy it from these people instead. They've got to have it a lower price still have enough margin to sell it to you at that price, and pay honey for the redirection. It's kind of a sales worst case dilemma.

[-] zqps@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 months ago

Honey's base business model probably falls apart without some linkjacking. You go to a website to buy something and it says no no go buy it from these people instead.

That's not what Honey does.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip -1 points 6 months ago

Additionally, the video asserts that Honey does not always find users the best discounts, either. Despite the browser extension's past advertising, the video showed multiple examples of Honey not presenting the best coupon codes to the consumer. Further supporting this claim is wording from Honey's FAQ page for partner businesses and its terms of use agreement. According to the FAQ page, any business that has an official partnership with Honey (in order to partner, a business must pay Honey a 3% commission) can add or remove codes from the platform. Additionally, the following paragraphs can be found within Honey's terms of use agreement:

While we try and find you the best available discounts and coupons, and to identify low prices, we may not always find you the best deal. PayPal is not responsible for any missed savings or rewards opportunities

[-] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 6 months ago

Can someone ELI5 what honey was actually doing?

[-] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Using browser exploits to steal commissions from affiliate links without even the user knowing. Let’s say you follow an affiliate link to a product and you go to checkout. When Honey pops up and tells you either that it found you a discount (or even if it pops up to tell you it didn’t find you anything) it secretly opens a new tab to the page which replaces the cookie in the browser that contains the code that identifies who to give the commission to. Instead of the person who gave you the link getting their commission, Honey gets it instead.

Then if you used PayPal checkout, they would also “find” you discounts but swap them out with lower ones and pocket the difference. For example you buy something for $10 and they find a 30% off coupon, but tell you it’s a 10% off coupon. You go to checkout with PayPal and they charge your card $9 but only pay the merchant $7 and pocket the other $2.

[-] VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz 0 points 6 months ago

I'm struggling to understand how everyone thought Honey made money. I have assumed from the first time I saw an ad for them that this is how they operate. It's not like it's difficult to prove or disprove either.

[-] Empricorn@feddit.nl 0 points 6 months ago

I'm so, so sick of these comments every time some shady shit is uncovered. "How could no one else see this, you're all so stupid, I knew from the very first ad!"

Yes yes, you're mommy's special little genius, despite conspicuously absent comments from that time...

[-] cadekat@pawb.social 0 points 6 months ago

It wasn't "uncovered" though. This is their business model. I've told every person I know using Honey for years that it's a shady extension and they should stop using it. Unfortunately I don't have a huge following to offset Honey's massive ad spend.

I'm not calling anyone stupid, but stop treating this like it's new information. Your browser warned you this might happen when you installed the extension:

[-] Empricorn@feddit.nl 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Lol, "access your data" is a little different from "overwrite cookies, now sending all promised creator revenue to Honey". Also, it found discounts, but stores had full control over how much, and even if it didn't give you a discount, it still claimed all referral revenue... Don't act like that was all obvious, intuitive, and known by you, it wasn't.

[-] cadekat@pawb.social -1 points 6 months ago

I'm not claiming that it was "intuitive", just that the browser did tell the user exactly what the add-on was allowed to do. Sure, Chrome and Firefox deserve some blame for not making the warning more explicit/dire, but they did make an attempt. Overwriting cookies and rewriting affiliate links are subsets of "access your data".

Also, I'm not claiming that I knew exactly what Honey was doing, just that I suspected it was shady and recommended no one use it.

[-] simple@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago

Hell yeah. Huge respect to him and the other youtuber that exposed this, it's crazy that Honey just pocketing most of the referral money has been undiscovered for so many years.

[-] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago

It was Megalag and his channel is amazing. The colorblind scam glasses investigation was amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 0 points 6 months ago

I don't get how anyone thought they would work. If your color blind they obviously don't magically alter the receptors in your eyes.

[-] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 months ago

If selling false hope wasn't profitable, there would be a lot of companies (and religions) go out of business.

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 0 points 6 months ago

There is a YouTube video that literaly said they were scamming from 2020.

Linus tech tips figure it out a year back and stop shilling it once they figured it out but for some reason didn't make a video about it?

[-] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 months ago

They didn't make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers. They may have communicated to creators separately to drop honey. They talked about it publicly once they found out honey was also lying to consumers about what they did.

[-] DasAlbatross@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

They didn't say anything because they're not pro consumer, they're pro linus media group. They didn't want to appear to be unfriendly to advertisers. There's a reason tech jesus was able to do a big expose on how crap their videos are. They want to churn out content and make money. Being seen as a problematic channel for advertisers doesn't help that.

[-] Kushan@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago

I don't know why LTT are somehow the bad guys in this, they weren't the only ones to realise that the extension messed with their affiliate links and it's not like it's a thing to publicly shout about every dropped sponsor.

I bet LTT has dropped plenty of sponsors without making a big public deal about it.

[-] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago

I don't think anyone is saying they're the bad guy. At least I didn't read it that way.

[-] MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

There's a few threads over on Reddit and the LTT forum about how Linus has apparently handled this all wrong, they should have made a video years ago, Linus being dismissive of if on WAN show is him being detached from reality, you know, the usual bullshit

Edit: ITT https://lemmy.world/comment/14273487

In fairness to me (and maybe you) Sync didn't load the comment initially so only after I kept reading I found it

[-] bizarroland@fedia.io 0 points 6 months ago

I can see how it happens though.

No one was doing any oversight on their practices. If you were running a referral affiliate link system, it must have seemed like honey was doing a really good job bringing customers to you.

I'm just kind of disappointed that nobody inside the company ever spoke up or blew any whistles and said "Hey, this is at best unethical if not entirely illegal and either way exposes us to the risk of a massive lawsuit, maybe we should just actually do our jobs instead of stealing the work of other people."

[-] dukeofdummies@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

I'm not. What do you get as a reward for blowing the whistle? Genuinely?

  1. There's no bounty, even if there was you wouldn't get it for at least a year after you blow the whistle.

  2. Once it's discovered it's you, you're fired. There goes your paycheck, your health insurance. Now your home is in jeopardy and you have no decent income verification to get a new one.

  3. Good luck working in any job even remotely related to what you know. You now have a stigma in any background check and while a privately owned mom & pop might look at you favorably, there ain't a single corporation who will take pride in hiring you. You're risky.

The most ethical person, is one with no debt, who owns their home, and has 8 months expenses saved up. That's not most Americans right now.

[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago

This is also why there was such coordinated effort to shut down wikileaks, or to at least stall out the cultural movement that was building behind it.

If you give people a methodology to whistleblow that at least on paper allows them to stay anonymous and avoid putting their life/livelyhood/survival in jeapordy, that removes one of the biggest disincentives.

[-] falidorn@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago

What do ethics have to do with saving money and owning property? Do poor people not have ethics?

[-] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

They can't really afford the risk it entails, is the point they are trying to make.

[-] lobut@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 months ago

I dunno man, whistleblowers aren't getting good treatment from what I see. Two got "suicided" last year from Boeing and OpenAI. The two Theranos whistleblowers were treated really poorly. I felt so bad for them. They're doing talks on ethics and stuff and I only wish them the best. They stood their ground on what they believed in.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Whistleblowers are always treated poorly because the people in charge never like being called out for their crimes. That's why you've got to have an exit strategy, like Snowden.

[-] Gloria@sh.itjust.works -1 points 6 months ago

I can see how nobody blew the whistle, leave his cushy job, prepare for 3-5 years of juristical drama exposing your name and image only to spend the rest of your live living in check notes… Russia.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Obligatory reminder that Snowden intended to go to Ecuador and only got stuck in Russia because that's where he was when the US revoked his passport.

[-] Aqarius@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president's plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.

this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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