
Amazon takes a swipe at Honey, PayPal’s $4B acquisition - Deinos
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/amazon-takes-a-swipe-at-paypals-4-billion-acquisition/
======
dangus
> “Honey tracks your private shopping behavior, collects data like your order
> history and items saved, and can read or change any of your data on any
> website you visit,”

Amazon does all three of these things, especially when you check out the
Chrome Web Store page for the "Amazon Assistant for Chrome." In fact that
particular web extension requires more permissions than Honey:

Display Notifications, Read and change your bookmarks, Detect your physical
location, and Manage your apps, extensions and themes (I wonder if it
uninstalls Honey!).

Honey's Privacy Policy doesn't say they can track data from _any_ website you
visit:

> Honey does not track your search engine history, emails, or your browsing on
> any site that is not a retail website (a site where you can shop and make a
> purchase). When you are on a pre-approved retail site, to help you save
> money, Honey will collect information about that site that lets us know
> which coupons and promos to find for you. We may also collect information
> about pricing and availability of items, which we can share with the rest of
> the Honey community.

> What data we do not collect

> We collect information that we believe can help us save our users time and
> money. This does not include, and we do not collect, any information from
> your search engine history, emails, or from websites that are not retail
> sites.

Now, I'd never join Honey as it is a service that's too invasive for my own
standards. However, Amazon is also blatantly lying about Honey - Honey only
seems to read website data from whitelisted shopping sites.

~~~
tempsy
The beauty of the CCPA is that you can request data for yourself and confirm
what Honey actually collects and compare with what they state they collect.

No need to speculate who is right at this point based on privacy policy
statements that may or may not be outdated or not totally comprehensive.

~~~
jagged-chisel
Do we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped? Why
wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the
minimal they state?

~~~
cmdshiftf4
>Do we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped?
Why wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the
minimal they state?

That's exactly what we expect. See Ruben Verborgh's tale in trying to retrieve
his _full_ data from Facebook, not just the summaries we're already presented
with in the app -
[https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/](https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/)

~~~
ssss11
Thank you so much for sharing this. I read a couple of further posts on
Ruben’s site and found that he holds very very similar views on data privacy
and decentralisation as I do. Very worthwhile time spent.

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anilshanbhag
When Honey was acquired, I wondered why it was valued at $4B when all it does
is apply coupon codes. Now it is clear - it's the data.

Look at [https://www.joinhoney.com/](https://www.joinhoney.com/) \- they make
no effort to tell you that they track / store all your order data across
websites !

~~~
Deinos
It is always the data. Everyone stores everything these days, even if it is
not immediately acted upon/sold. If it is not immediately used, it is still a
bargaining chip for valuations/acquisitions.

~~~
reciprocindy
Yep data is more valuable than oil.

------
zelly
When they ask me how I knew it was a market top, I will tell them a Chrome
extension sold for $4 billion.

~~~
dangus
Honey's revenue is $100 million and growing by 100% a year.

How is $4 billion overvalued for them?

They have 17 million users and they aggregate shopping data of _everything
those users purchase online from any shopping website_.

There are certainly other economic indicators of a bubble but this is not one
of them. A giant payment processing company like PayPal has a lot of reasons
to "overpay" for a company like Honey, including the fact that they could have
Honey prioritize retailers that use PayPal.

~~~
chatmasta
Maybe the implication is that it’s a weak product because it depends on a
third party platform to continue functioning. If chrome eliminated extensions
tomorrow, or changed its TOS so honey would be in violation, what would honey
do?

~~~
r_singh
That's actually why it makes sense for them to join PayPal which has a lot
more influence.

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yalogin
PayPal acquirer honey for the data of course but I still believe it will be a
write off in a couple years. Those kind of browser extensions are really low
user retention a doing term something will come along and people just move on
to it. Their users all are price sensitive deal hunters and the moment
something comes up they will move.

~~~
donmcronald
It’s crazy.

\- They’re beholden to the extension stores for distribution.

\- They probably hijack affiliate links which I personally think is a type of
fraud. Regardless of the ethics, it’s detrimental to retailers that allow it
because the real people driving traffic will give up.

\- They collect data that would otherwise be exclusive to the retailer. Why
buy data from Amazon if Honey will sell you the same thing plus a bunch of
other related data?

There is ZERO upside for successful retailers like Amazon and a bunch of
downside.

~~~
takeda
Slightly unrelated, but they also faked reviews on chrome. Just compare
reviews on Chrome vs reviews on Firefox.

------
bordercases
Are there open source equivalents to Honey using APIs from existing websites
for more common vendors?

~~~
on_and_off
that would be great ! I can't remember its name but I have been tempted to
install a similar price tracking extension .. except that it can siphon all my
browsing data. hard pass.

An open source app would provide _some_ safety around such a permission

~~~
thinkling
I'd love to see an "app store" of fully (non-obfuscated) open source & vetted
browser extensions.

------
deegles
Does Honey sell services to hedge funds?

~~~
brenden2
Most likely. Many, many businesses sell their data to hedge funds through
shell companies or 3rd parties that make it extremely difficult to figure out
where your data goes.

~~~
treebornfrog
Any proof?

~~~
brenden2
I worked at a major quant hedge fund for a while, and my duties involved
working with these data sets.

