LegalEagle Suing PayPal's Honey

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.

Glad he mentioned Honey/PayPal isn't the only one operating in this space. Capital One has been trying to push their program on me for quite some time.

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.

Aside from the element of deception towards their sponsored creators, I wonder if this will set president 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

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.

One upon a time, websites had actually useful coupons and RetailMeNot was created by the people who made BugMeNot and it was great, but more and more websites caught on and RetailMeNot was bought out to the tune of $300 million.

Then everything went to shit.

Affiliate links and coupons should be banned.. Artificially inflating prices so that some users can add a code to get a discount. Huge in antics for years, but growing rapidly in Europe for the last 10.

I hope LegalEagle takes them to the fucking cleaners and sets a precedent for scumbag companies like these who pull off affiliate hijacking and data harvesting.

Can someone ELI5 what honey was actually doing?

Will Barry B. Benson bee involved?

Hope this case won't be used against consumers in the future. If I want to use/make an extension that scrubs all affiliate links and cookies that should be legal, same with an extension that replaces all affiliate links/cookies with ones from someone I want to support. Advertisers and their partners have no rights to anything being stored/done on my devices.

Not defending what Paypal was doing, but the real issue for me is that they had no intention of actually finding the best codes/discounts, not what they did with affiliate links.

When MKB commented on the situation, he avoided dropping the name PayPal. Seemingly on purpose. Just in case it would help him in the future.

Eh. I don't care about this because it only affects "influencers" who are willing to sacrifice the integrity of their work to advertise products.

Any "content creator" who lost money from this can go get fucked. They can all eat shit for collectively lowering everyone else's standards and contributing to a 'new normal.'