Is the Honey affiliate link “scam” over?
  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
    32·
    7 days ago

    I’m surprised at how many otherwise intelligent people I know have installed the Honey plugin.

    I mean, it was pretty obvious from the start who the product was.

    • sensiblepuffin@lemmy.funami.tech
      8·
      6 days ago

      It’s easy to say in hindsight. Plenty of products initially are great, then some with inevitably sell out to a data farming company or whatever. Now, if you’re still using Honey after having heard of this, I don’t know what to say.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
        6·
        6 days ago

        Honey being one of them, it did start as a simple addon that gathered and automatically tried coupon codes for you. It did exactly what people expected it to do.

        But obviously once you start getting hundreds of millions in venture capital funds, and eventually sell yourself to Paypal for 4 billion, it’s clear that isn’t all you are doing any more.

        I did assume in the end that it stole all my shopping data, and probably bunch of browsing history in general, which is why I had it installed in a separate browser, but I didn’t expect it to be doing affiliate hacking and blackmailing partner deals for the coupons.

        • sensiblepuffin@lemmy.funami.tech
          1·
          16 hours ago

          Exactly. I used it for like… 2 years? Then I noticed it started not being as helpful and got rid. But I didn’t hear that they’d sold out to PayPal of all people. I’m willing to bet most people didn’t either.

    • NovalingEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Well, I feel a decent amount of people knew it was selling their data, and just used it anyway thinking they’d get a discount from that sold data. Unfortunate but the modern reality we live in, and hey, nobody’s perfect as we’re all probably using a service or two that it’s totally bad for you (especially games)

      But straight up stealing money from the YouTubers who thought they were getting sponsorship money? Now that shits crazy, and sounds illegal from the start. I mean how did they plan to respond to this once they were found out? Call me a fool but I wouldn’t expect a company to literally steal from their advisers/promoters.

    • Ashley@lemmy.ca
      28·
      7 days ago

      Because nobody has the mental bandwidth to think in depth about every decision they make

    • remotelove@lemmy.ca
      11·
      7 days ago

      I installed it and tried it on occasion, but it never worked for finding any coupons. It was the only extension I had that I kept disabled because I always thought it’s interaction with the browser and web pages was sus as fuck.

      TBH, it was more of a curiosity I kept around to explore one day. I also dissect and detonate malware a few times a week, so I just treated Honey as such.

      (That folder named “malware” on my computer is actually real. I pitty the poor soul who steals it thinking its just a joke to store my private data.)

      Unrelated: I finally got my first .SVG downloader today, actually. Whoever the fuck thought it would be a good idea to add a script tag to SVG needs to be put down.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
        6·
        7 days ago

        Whoever the fuck thought it would be a good idea to add a script tag to SVG needs to be put down.

        SVG was in part intended as a replacement for Flash, which had animations and interactive graphic elements. The script tag has been there since 2001’s SVG 1.0 🤷

    • rhys@mastodon.rhys.wtf
      3·
      7 days ago

      @adespoton @misk I’m surprised at how many otherwise intelligent people I know have installed the NOT_A_NAZI.EXE program.

      I mean, it was pretty painfully obvious for multiple decades in-between our repeated attempts to market them where their singular focus lay.