I agree that Honey is a sleazy extension, but should I be worried that if they lose, it will set a bad precedent? From the video, the Honey extension works by injecting a Honey referral code into all online shopping transactions, possibly overwriting whatever influencer referral code the user was under. If Honey loses, the court decision is likely to say that an extension creator is liable if they tamper with referral codes and tracking links.
This will be a problem for privacy extensions that strip out tracking cookies and referral URLs, since they are also messing with influencer attribution, though not for profit but at the request of the user.
That makes no sense. The problem is not that an extension is tampering with tracker links, it is that it is falsely attributing itself as a sales representative.
Not a lawyer but I think the fact that honey profited, like, a lot from this is a key factor. From my understanding it’s hard to say what they didn’t wasn’t straight up theft. What’s more, they lied about what they were doing so the consumer was unaware of the ‘product’ they were getting. So while I get your concern, I wouldn’t be too worried about precedent here. It’s less ‘this should be made illegal!’ and more ‘they def committed several actual crimes’
In such case, my opinion would be that referal stripping should be OK. It is the customer choice, even if automated, and the extension clearly tell what he does. You can see it, using the metaphor used in the video exposing the problem, as just not giving the referal card the store salesman gave you.
In the case of Honey, they do it behind the customer back, and the original video metaphor is quite right. They could at least ask i f the user wish to attribute the sale to Honey instead of whatever influencer/website originally pointed you to the product, but they don’t.
Nah, honey was marketed as a coupon tool without mentioning the referral manipulation it did that is its actual business model. Those privacy extensions just need to call out that they remove referral trackers too and everything is fine with them.
Not a lawyer and haven’t seen the lawsuit but I’ve watched a lot of legal eagle and other lawyers and I suspect it’s not about them manipulating codes. I also doubt this is the sort of case trying to set a precedent in any legal sense.
Likely it’s just boring fraud because they deceived content creators and users with lies to make money.
A different company doing the same thing but being honest might be unethical and terrible but probably wouldn’t be sued.
I agree that Honey is a sleazy extension, but should I be worried that if they lose, it will set a bad precedent? From the video, the Honey extension works by injecting a Honey referral code into all online shopping transactions, possibly overwriting whatever influencer referral code the user was under. If Honey loses, the court decision is likely to say that an extension creator is liable if they tamper with referral codes and tracking links.
This will be a problem for privacy extensions that strip out tracking cookies and referral URLs, since they are also messing with influencer attribution, though not for profit but at the request of the user.
That makes no sense. The problem is not that an extension is tampering with tracker links, it is that it is falsely attributing itself as a sales representative.
Not a lawyer but I think the fact that honey profited, like, a lot from this is a key factor. From my understanding it’s hard to say what they didn’t wasn’t straight up theft. What’s more, they lied about what they were doing so the consumer was unaware of the ‘product’ they were getting. So while I get your concern, I wouldn’t be too worried about precedent here. It’s less ‘this should be made illegal!’ and more ‘they def committed several actual crimes’
In such case, my opinion would be that referal stripping should be OK. It is the customer choice, even if automated, and the extension clearly tell what he does. You can see it, using the metaphor used in the video exposing the problem, as just not giving the referal card the store salesman gave you.
In the case of Honey, they do it behind the customer back, and the original video metaphor is quite right. They could at least ask i f the user wish to attribute the sale to Honey instead of whatever influencer/website originally pointed you to the product, but they don’t.
Nah, honey was marketed as a coupon tool without mentioning the referral manipulation it did that is its actual business model. Those privacy extensions just need to call out that they remove referral trackers too and everything is fine with them.
Not a lawyer and haven’t seen the lawsuit but I’ve watched a lot of legal eagle and other lawyers and I suspect it’s not about them manipulating codes. I also doubt this is the sort of case trying to set a precedent in any legal sense.
Likely it’s just boring fraud because they deceived content creators and users with lies to make money.
A different company doing the same thing but being honest might be unethical and terrible but probably wouldn’t be sued.
I don’t see a problem if they let the user know what those extensions are doing, unlike Honey.
Not an issue because FOSS