Nia [She/Her]

Reposting my tl;dw from another post:

Affiliate injection: When you click the “Find coupons” button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but if you visit a site/store via (insert YouTuber) 's sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey’s. The YouTuber loses the profit they would’ve made, and instead, PayPal/Honey gets it, despite the YouTuber doing the work. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn’t find any, or if you click okay on their “We didn’t find any coupons, but this is the best deal!” popup.

Misdirection: They will show that they found the “best deal” while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals; if a company has a partnership with Honey, they may, for example, have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it’s the “best deal” or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but use them as little as possible.

Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is a reminder that they still do “normal” scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.

tl;dr: They scam you and your favorite content creators with misleading practice and affiliate injection; the only true “winners” with Honey and other similar services are the service themselves and the stores they partner with.

Thanks for sharing this, looked into it myself and that’s quite unfortunate.

Why does every piece of cool software end up having some reactionary midlife crisis behind them?

I can’t seem to get the cookie page to pop up on this one even if I turn off adblockers, but in most cases yes.

Some sites I’ll go to using my regular US-based IP address, and I’ll have to manually click through to disable cookies, sometimes by category and sometimes individually for dozens or hundreds but to accept all is one click. It’s heavily designed to pressure you to click accept all and move on.

If I connect to an EU country via VPN and visit the same sites on a fresh browser session, I’ll see a similar “No I don’t accept” popup.