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LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey
(youtu.be)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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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.
I just assumed they operated by collecting and selling user data. So while I knew the business model was unethical, I didn't expect them to get more creative!
That was my assumption. I never use anything advertised on YouTube (not even magic spoon as I saw it's like $10 a box). I thought Honey was making money with collecting user data.
But that's my cynical mind assuming everything is a scam.
That would arguably be even worst.
Let's not pretend they're not doing that as well.
I love the number of people coming out of the woodwork with “obviously” ex post facto. Like everybody could just intuit how this operated, both in the affiliate stuffing and the deal agreements. It is difficult to show the latter.
Difficult to prove the latter of course, but out of the two, it's not what most people seem to be complaining the most about.
You'd need the first one to get big enough to pull up the second one anyways.
Influencers complain about the latter because it's a better message for their audiences. If they complain mostly about their share everybody would tell them go to fuck themselves
I thought they made it from selling user data.
Tbf its not a given they don't also do this.
True, that's a good point, they likely try to make as much money as possible in as many different ways.
Same. I thought they sold your browsing and purchase history.
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...
This really does fall under two umbrella cautions. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and how are they making money? Suspicion was warranted from day one, especially if it was owned by PayPal.
Now, there are a lot of smart people on the internet who could have tracked all those messages and figured it out, like ultimately happened. I just wish they'd done it sooner.
Loads of people are suspicious of coupon schemes. They look dodgy. It's no wonder that people come along after one of these schemes turns out to actually be a scam to say "see, I knew these things were bad" with the only evidence being that they never subscribed to it
Their fault is they claim it was this one specifically
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:
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.
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.
Well that's just because your are mommy's smart boy. You're just so much smarter than all the other little boys.
Thank you.
If I remember correctly influencers went out of their way to promise Honey was not doing anything sketchy like selling your data and said they got a small commission from the seller free of charge. Turns out Honey stole others commissions.
I assumed from the start that they were purposefully holding back promo codes, or scraping them from users and holding the affected sites ransom (in a sense). "We'll stop serving this cupon if you become a member." Scummy, but ultimately still slightly beneficial to the end user, a Robbin Hood crime. (Ignoring the people who work with genuinely good companies to get discount codes for things like student projects. Unrecognized casualties.)
It's the affiliate link stealing that's become the source of outcry. That was more stealthy and essentially flipped the script. Now everyone publicly in support of it is being burned.
If you were never involved in it, it really is just funny to see how quickly a corporate Robin Hood figure can flip sides. It's not like we haven't seen numerous examples before, some of them literally taking the namesake.