TechTakes

When I was young I knew people who installed those 'get money for moving your mouse' things, and they never got a dime. So I always mentally ignore these things as scams. 'it is just free money' is quite the red flag.

Minor gripe with the video 'if they product is free you are likely the product' isn't true imho. You are always also the product, unless they explicitly go out of their way to make it clear you are not the product (and even then you cannot be totally sure). You can't pay your way out of the rot economy. In fact, as you are now a person who spends money, I'd think the value of your data actually goes up. A database filled with data of users who never spend a dime online seems like it would be almost useless to me.

As someone who's never even considered interacting with any part of this whole system, this is really funny honestly. It's like a matryoshka of shady business practices.

Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.

I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.

I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olson's riposte to Doug Walker's The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering "an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey" (35:43).

Making money via stealing commissions from affiliate links, tbf, wasn't the business model I was suspecting from Honey. I always thought they were scamming but I thought it was going to be from selling your browsing data or something similar. Then again, they still might do that.

Holy shit. Managed to never run into them due to sponsorblock but the ways mega corps find ways to extract money out of everyone never ceases to amaze