alt Hacker NewsHoney's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers
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Original MegaLag video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.
Over 15 years ago I worked with a telco that had similar affiliate issues. We decided to stop paying any affiliate commission at all and evaluate sales after some time to decide to continue the experiment or not. There was a little decrease in traffic to the site but no measurable decrease in sales of new plans. There were several check moments and data validation after that, but sales numbers remained as they were.
The conclusion was that affiliate marketing claimed a lot of sales in their reporting, but the brand was strong enough (this company was #2 by market share in the country and #1 on most brand metrics) to get those customers without affiliate links.
Apparently this thing got approved for the chrome store, which confirms that "store" approvals are near worthless for malware filtering.
Why do Amazon and others pay out to Honey's affiliate accounts? They know no real referrals are coming from them.
It started as a clone of the camelcamelcamel Amazon price history site and got kicked out by Amazon for abusing the system. It pivoted to a coupon site and started sucking down user data with the plugin when PayPal paid $4Bil CASH. Honey cost me affiliate marketing commissions.
the guy that wrote this blog post also recently wrote about AppLovin, a company who he alleges installs apps without user consent. his response to this was... to short their stock?
Didn't this Honey fraud thing break like a year ago (or longer)? This is the second story I've seen about it in the last couple of days and I guess I'm surprised it's even still around.
The entire affiliate "ecosystem" is cancer. I'd love to see Amazon turn it off entirely.
TLDR;
- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.
- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.
- Honey should have "stood down" if an affiliate link was detected, but their algorithm would decide to skip the stand down based on if the user could be the an affiliate representative testing for compliance.
Allegedly.
Article is offline for me right now - however, it's available here for those still to read: https://archive.is/7Y9Jq
No honour among thieves, I guess.
I thought this was going to be about honey adulteration, which is a major problem.
I came here to read about fraud with honey, you know, the bees-spit-and-flowers-sperm sugary stuff.
I hear there is lots of fraud where bees honey is mixed with sugars and sold off as “honey”.
I’m disappointed this is about a browser plugin that no body in their right mind should be using at all.
Oh, this is about a shopping plugin and not actual honey, boring.
I mean, fraud in online advertising? Say it ain't so!
Likening any of this to Volkswagen emissions compliance scandal does a huge disservice by treating "Affiliate Marketing" as far too important.
"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
To be honest, the Megalag video really made it clear what a great product Honey is. It is very explicit about the fact that you, as the consumer, can get extraordinary deals by using the extension.
This also makes me think that the whole campaign is astroturfed. The only "victims" of Honey are influencers and storefronts, who of course will do their part in trying to get their customers to stop using the product, but for the consumer there really are only benefits with using the extension.
The only arguments against Honey is that they are supposedly breaking some internal rules of the advertising industry (and who cares about those? Certainly not me) and that they are offering deals better than the store wants to offer to you, which makes an extremely compelling case for using that extension.
I always considered extensions like Honey to be quite scammy and believed that they offered little benefit, but apparently I was wrong.
>And the effort Honey expended, to conceal its behavior from industry insiders, makes it particularly clear that Honey knew it would be in trouble if it was caught.
The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.
I used to work for an ad tech company (which I know already makes me the devil to some around here), and even I think that they crossed a line with this. A lot of industry terms are coded in corporate speak to make them sound better (think "revealed preferences" or "enabling personalization"), but I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.
Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice